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First published in Particular Books 2012
This edition Published in Penguin Books 2015
Selection and editorial material copyright © Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik and Cicely Herbert, 2012
Cover design: Richard Green
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editors has been asserted
The Acknowledgements on pages 275–284 constitute an extension of this copyright page
ISBN: 978-0-141-38953-0
Foreword
Love
Sappho, translated by Cicely Herbert Two Fragments: ‘Love holds me captive again’; ‘As a gale on the mountainside bends the oak tree’
C. P. Cavafy, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard Longings
Robert Graves Love Without Hope
W. B. Yeats Her Anxiety
Cempulappeyanirar, translated by A. K. Ramanujan What He Said
John Donne The Good Morrow
W. S. Merwin Separation
Edna St Vincent Millay ‘What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why’
Sir Thomas Wyatt They Flee from Me
William Blake The Sick Rose
George Gordon, Lord Byron ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’
W. H. Auden If I Could Tell You
Adrian Mitchell Celia Celia
Frank O’Hara Animals
Michael Drayton ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’
Elizabeth Bishop One Art
Kate Clanchy Content
Anon. ‘Western wind when wilt thou blow’
London
William Wordsworth Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802
John Agard Toussaint L’Ouverture Acknowledges Wordsworth’s Sonnet ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’
Sir Thomas Wyatt ‘Tagus farewell’
Oscar Wilde Symphony in Yellow
Sebastian Barker In the Heart of Hackney
Fleur Adcock Immigrant
James Elroy Flecker Ballad of the Londoner
T. E. Hulme The Embankment
Anon. London Bells
John Betjeman City
D. J. Enright Poem on the Underground
Paul Farley Monopoly
William Dunbar from To the City of London
The Wider World
J. P. Clark-Bekederemo Ibadan
Vasko Popa, translated by Anne Pennington Belgrade
Nazim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk Baku at Night
Adam Zagajewski, translated by Clare Cavanagh Star
Derek Mahon J. P. Donleavy’s Dublin
Milton Kessler Thanks Forever
Li Bai, translated by Vikram Seth Listening to a Monk from Shu Playing the Lute
Sujata Bhatt Finding India in Unexpected Places
Gary Snyder Two Poems Written at Maple Bridge Near Su-Chou
Jack Mapanje The Palm Trees at Chigawe
Mbuyiseni Mtshali Inside My Zulu Hut
Léopold Sédar Senghor, translated by Gerard Benson Nocturne
Langston Hughes The Negro Speaks of Rivers
Exile and Loss
Partaw Naderi, translated by Sarah Maguire and Yama Yari My Voice
Iain Crichton Smith The Exiles
Eavan Boland The Emigrant Irish
Moniza Alvi Indian Cooking
A. E. Housman ‘Into my heart an air that kills’
John Burnside A Private Life
Carol Ann Duffy Prayer
Lotte Kramer Exodus
Choman Hardi My children
Yves Bonnefoy, translated by Anthony Rudolf ‘Let a place be made’
Seasons
Jackie Kay Promise
Robert Burns Up in the Morning Early
Norman MacCaig February – not everywhere
David Malouf Thaw
Patrick Kavanagh Wet Evening in April
Paula Meehan Seed
Thomas Hardy Proud Songsters
Robert Browning Home-Thoughts, from Abroad
George Herbert Virtue
Andrew Young A Prehistoric Camp
John Milton Song: On May Morning
Geoffrey Chaucer ‘Now welcome Summer’
Philip Larkin Cut Grass
Anon. ‘Sumer is icumen in’
Derek Walcott Midsummer, Tobago
Matsuo Bashō, translated by Kenneth Rexroth ‘Autumn evening’
William Shakespeare Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold’
Andrew Salkey A song for England
Edward Thomas Snow
Bei Dao, translated by David Hinton with Yanbing Chen Winter Travels
The Natural World
Grace Nichols For the Life of This Planet
Judith Wright Rainforest
William Blake The Tyger
Denise Levertov Living
Philip Larkin The Trees
Cicely Herbert Everything Changes
Anne Stevenson Ragwort
David Constantine Coltsfoot and Larches
Walter de la Mare Silver
Ken Smith The bee dance
Anon. The Twa Corbies
Owen Sheers Swallows
Frances Leviston Industrial
Paul Muldoon An Old Pit Pony
John Clare Emmonsails Heath in Winter
Gerard Manley Hopkins Inversnaid
Families
Thomas Hardy Heredity
Robin Robertson New Gravity
Sylvia Plath Child
Ted Hughes Full Moon and Little Frieda
Stephen Spender To My Daughter
Miroslav Holub, translated by David Young and Dana Hábová Spacetime
Anne Bradstreet To My Dear and Loving Husband
Annabelle Despard Should You Die First
Lorna Goodison I Am Becoming My Mother
Ruth Fainlight Handbag
Patrick Kavanagh Memory of my Father
Gillian Clarke Taid’s Grave
Out There
Derek Mahon Distances
Elizabeth Jennings Delay
Michael Donaghy The Present
Jamie McKendrick Out There
Anne Stevenson It looks so simple from a distance …
Norman MacCaig Stars and planets
Ernesto Cardenal, translated by Ernesto Cardenal and Robert Pring-Mill On Lake Nicaragua
James Berry Benediction
John F. Deane Canticle
Don Paterson Road
Sean O’Brien The River Road
Katharine Towers The Way We Go
Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger ‘Thread suns’ 133
Stephen Crane ‘I saw a man pursuing the horizon’
Adrian Mitchell Song in Space
Dreams
Robert Herrick Dreams
Wallace Stevens Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock
W. B. Yeats He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
Thom Gunn The Reassurance
Kathleen Raine Dream
Peter Porter Waiting for Rain in Devon
W. S. Merwin Rain Travel
Kathleen Jamie The Creel
Judith Kazantzis Freight song
Judith Chernaik Tortoise
Wisława Szymborska, translated by Grazyna Drabik with Sharon Olds The Two Apes of Brueghel
Faustin Charles Viv
Samuel Taylor Coleridge from Frost at Midnight
Seamus Heaney The Rescue
Music
Percy Bysshe Shelley ‘Music, when soft voices die’
D. H. Lawrence Piano
Kamau Brathwaite Naima
Anon. ‘The silver swan’
John Fuller Concerto for Double Bass
Charles Tomlinson If Bach Had Been a Beekeeper
Christine De Luca At Sixty
Thomas Dekker Cradle Song
William Shakespeare Ariel’s Song: ‘Full fathom five’
John Milton Song from Comus: ‘Sabrina fair’
Kathleen Raine Maire Macrae’s Song
Arthur Symons A Tune
Sense and Nonsense
Judith Rodriguez Nasturtium Scanned
Edwin Morgan The Loch Ness Monster’s Song
Anon. ‘I saw a Peacock with a fiery tail’
Roger McGough The Leader
John Hegley Into Rail
Valerie Bloom Sun a-shine, rain a-fall
Edward Lear ‘There was an Old Man with a beard’
Anon. ‘I have a gentil cock’
Anon., translated by Kevin Crossley-Holland Anglo-Saxon Riddle
Gerard Benson Riddle
William Carlos Williams This Is Just to Say
Earle Birney giovanni caboto/john cabot
Jo Shapcott Quark
Wendy Cope The Uncertainty of the Poet
Lewis Carroll The Lobster Quadrille
The Darker Side
Robert Frost Acquainted with the Night
Emily Dickinson ‘I stepped from Plank to Plank’
John Clare I Am
May Sarton A Glass of Water
John Milton Sonnet: On His Blindness
David Wright On Himself
Ernest Dowson They Are Not Long
Gavin Ewart A 14-Year-Old Convalescent Cat in the Winter
John Keats When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be
William Shakespeare Song: ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’
Dylan Thomas Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night
Louis MacNeice Coda
John Donne Holy Sonnet: ‘Death be not proud’
War
James Fenton Wind
Derek Walcott Map of the New World: Archipelagoes
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin Swineherd
Thomas Hardy In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’
Walt Whitman Reconciliation
Carl Sandburg Grass
Isaac Rosenberg August 1914
Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Oliver Bernard Letter to André Billy, 9 April 1915
Michael Longley Harmonica
Marina Tsvetaeva, translated by Elaine Feinstein ‘I know the truth – give up all other truths!’
Wilfred Owen Anthem for Doomed Youth
Rudyard Kipling A Dead Statesman
Siegfried Sassoon Everyone Sang
Laurie Lee The Long War
Tony Harrison The Morning After (August 1945)
Charles Causley Return to Cornwall
George Szirtes Accordionist
Carolyn Forché The Visitor
Lotte Kramer Boy with Orange
Carol Ann Duffy Passing-Bells
The Artist as ‘Maker’
William Blake ‘To see a World in a Grain of Sand’
Dannie Abse Mysteries
Miroslav Holub, translated by Ian Milner In the microscope
David Morley Fulcrum/Writing a World
Louis MacNeice Snow
Czesław Miłosz, translated by Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass Blacksmith Shop
Carter Revard Birch Canoe
Elizabeth Cook Bowl
Yannis Ritsos, translated by Rae Dalven Miracle
Yang Lian, translated by John Cayley Vase
Menna Elfyn, translated by Elin ap Hywel Brooch
Elizabeth Jennings Bonnard
Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Czesław Miłosz and Peter Dale Scott Nothing Special
Erich Fried, translated by Stuart Hood A Collector
Nii Ayikwei Parkes Tin Roof
Don Paterson Web
Imtiaz Dharker Carving
Sophia de Mello Breyner, translated by Ruth Fainlight In the Poem
The Poet as Prophet
Niyi Osundare I Sing of Change
William Blake ‘And did those feet in ancient time’
Percy Bysshe Shelley Ozymandias
Fred D’Aguiar Mama Dot
Langston Hughes Dream Boogie
Wole Soyinka Season
Merle Collins Free
Carole Satyamurti Ourstory
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated by David Constantine Optimistic Little Poem
Sheenagh Pugh Sometimes
Percy Bysshe Shelley Lines from Hellas
Louise Glück The Undertaking
Poetry: A Defence
Palladas, translated by Tony Harrison ‘Loving the rituals’
Seamus Heaney Colmcille the Scribe
Grace Nichols Epilogue
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, translated by Paul Muldoon The Language Issue
Tomas Tranströmer, translated by John F. Deane From March ’79
Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid from Poetry
Po Chü-i, translated by Arthur Waley The Red Cockatoo
Osip Mandelstam, translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin ‘You took away all the oceans and all the room’
Saadi Youssef, translated by Khaled Mattawa Poetry
William Shakespeare Sonnet 65: ‘Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea’
Jaroslav Seifert, translated by Ewald Osers And Now Goodbye
George Mackay Brown The Poet
Czesław Miłosz, translated by Czesław Miłosz and Robert Hass And Yet the Books
Acknowledgements
‘There is a man haunts the forest, that hangs odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on brambles …’
Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 3, Scene 2
To the farsighted managers of London Underground, who have kept poems circling on Tube trains for the past thirty years; and to the poets past and present whose words have entertained millions on their Underground journeys.
The Editors
Poems on the Underground started life in January 1986 as an experiment by three friends, lovers of poetry, who persuaded London Underground to post a few poems in its trains. The Tube managers kindly doubled the number of spaces for which we secured funding, and London Underground has supported the programme ever since.
We had a few precedents, going back to the love-sick Orlando, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, hanging ‘odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on brambles’, to the scorn of his beloved Rosalind. Verses about the Thames were inscribed in the pavement between Westminster and Waterloo Bridges for the 1951 Festival of Britain; the short poems, long since vandalized and removed, were by an eclectic band of poets including Blake, T. S. Eliot and Spike Milligan.
Right from the start, our own project struck a special chord with the public. Poets and press thronged the launch at Aldwych Station, on the Strand – also a victim of changing times (it was shut in 1994). Since then, the simple idea of offering poetry to a mass audience on public transport has spread to cities across the world, from Dublin, Paris, Stuttgart, Helsinki, Stockholm, Vienna and Madrid to Prague, Warsaw, Moscow, Melbourne, Shanghai and Beijing. Our posters too travel widely, going to British Council teaching centres in Europe, Asia and Africa as well as schools and libraries throughout the UK.
We’ve also expanded beyond the Tube, commissioning new poems for Carnival of the Animals (the poets carefully chosen for their resemblance to each animal) and new music for a variety of poems old and new. We’ve regularly offered live events related to the Tube displays, combining music, poetry and occasionally film. We’ve organized several competitions for young poets, working with the Poetry Society; the prize was display on the Tube. We also ran a competition for over-eighteens with The Times Literary Supplement and we’ve commissioned new English translations of French, German and Finnish classic and contemporary poems.
Our first display of poems featured Seamus Heaney (nearly a decade before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature), the young Guyanese writer Grace Nichols, Shelley, Robert Burns and the American poet William Carlos Williams, all of whom hoped to reach a general public with poetry that was revolutionary for its time. The combination of old and new, familiar and unfamiliar, seemed to work, and we’ve held all along to the same general principles: to support living poets; to pay tribute to the magnificent tradition of English poetry; and to include many less-famous poets who have contributed to the richness and diversity of that tradition.
In this anthology, the poems that have been displayed on London Underground trains are collected together under headings which embrace the great subjects of human existence: love, death, music and art, dreams, the natural world, war and peace. We have been intrigued to discover how the poems, placed together in this way, often seem to find an extra depth through their proximity to one another. One poem seems to enrich another and so leads the reader on a journey full of discoveries, odd paths and byways, or across oceans to other lands, and indeed to other worlds.
All the poems reprinted here have appeared as posters on London Underground trains, and have been read by thousands of commuters and visitors from every part of the globe. There are poems that have been written as a result of the darkest human experiences, including war, exile and death, while other poems reflect on joyous and life-enhancing moments: the birth of a child, love of one’s home or country, the profound pleasures of great art or beauty.
Gerard Benson, Judith Chernaik, Cicely Herbert
London, 2012
Our dear friend and colleague Gerard Benson died in April 2014. His many talents contributed immeasurably to the broad reach of Poems on the Underground. He combined a profound knowledge of literature with a love of comic poetry, riddles, and nonsense poems, and he had an unerring instinct for choosing poems with broad appeal. He knew exactly what would work on the Tube. He added an anarchic strain to our selections, and his readings at live events, including his riveting declamation of Edwin Morgan’s ‘Loch Ness Monster’s Song’, enchanted audiences in London and, on one memorable occasion, at New York’s Grand Central Station. His voice lives on in a recording of his poems for the Poetry Archive, his ten poetry collections and his award-winning Puffin anthologies
JC and CH
London, 2015