POETS Day.
Used to mean, on a Friday, Pissing Off Early Tomorrow’s Saturday, when I was working away from home all week. Well today’s Friday so let’s reflect on the VE75 anniversary.
Actually there is a National Poetry Day if you wre wondering. This year’s National Poetry Day will take place on Thursday 1st October 2020. Still as the saying once said – the early worm gets the flour and pasta!
Did you know that poetry sales have been rising over the past 5 or 6 years. I know, for instance, that in 2018 poetry sales rose by 12% and there were significat rises in the under 35’s. So I wonder what budding talent – young and old – we have in the club. We all know about Paul the Bard our Chairperson. So I am asking for your contributions. You can choose Isolation, or Running – or any other topic that grabs your fancy. Or just dive in.
For those who have never got into it. Do have a go. Put a thought in your head , then add another and another and who knows where you’ll end up. Contributions – please – you can sign yourself Anon if you want
Usual address grannanpm@gmail.com.
Good luck.
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Poets have written about running ever since Homer and Pindar in Ancient Greece nearly 3,000 years ago, and have sought to make running as memorable and vivid in words as it is in action. Two fine poems from the early 20th century typify the range. One is about the liberty and self-expression that running can bring in a tragic time, the other about the intense fusion of body and spirit in the sprint to the finish of a race.
Many runners will be familiar with the lines that end the first poem:
And we run because we like it
Through the broad bright land.
The full poem and the story behind it are even more resonant and evocative. The poem was written by a 19-year-old English army officer, Charles Hamilton Sorley, during World War I. During his high-school years at Marlborough College in England, Sorley loved to walk and run on the hills around the town. To Sorley’s delight the students at the college were sent out on cross-country runs that they called “sweats.”
When World War I was declared only a few months after he left school, Sorley volunteered for training as a junior officer. “The Song of the Ungirt Runners” was written during this period of training early in 1915. When Sorley reached the front line later that year, he had time only to write a few powerful poems that angrily condemn the slaughter of the trenches. “Ungirt Runners” is not a war poem in this direct way, yet it is full of the tumult of catastrophe, the storm, and tearing tempest of that time.
With its images of troubled, stormy nature and disoriented, distrustful humans, it catches perfectly the sense of anxiety, doubt and doom suffered by that unlucky generation of young men who came to adulthood between the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 and marching up the line to death in the trenches after 1914.
Yet through the storm and howling waves and troubled weather, the swinging rhythm of the runners pulses onward. They run forward through the tearing tempest lightly, determinedly, and almost joyfully, without purpose other than the compulsion to run. The opening of the movie Chariots of Fire, with the athletes loping along the seashore in the wind and spray, was perhaps inspired by Sorley’s poem. The poem affirms that running is an act of nature, and like other acts of nature it needs no motive or explanation:
Does the tearing tempest pause?
Do the tree-tops ask it why?
So we run without a cause
’Neath the big bare sky.
It is, for a soldier, a poem defiant of authority and reward. They do not run for cause or prize, in a war not of their making, but to find freedom, contact with nature, release from that world of strife and loss, and some personal pleasure in a time of imposed control.
And why “ungirt?” The British army then wore coarse heavy khaki, encumbered with belts and cross straps, and bound their legs in tight wrap-around “puttees.” Runners hate such cumbersome binding. Sorley wrote from the front a few weeks later to his old school principal, “O for a pair of shorts and my long loose coloured jersey … once again.” The poem expresses the defiant joy of moving “ungirt,” free, instead of marching all day in uniform and in step to someone else’s shouted commands.
The repeated “We” also expresses a human bond among the runners at a deeper level than the world of cause and prizes can forge. The troops in training were encouraged to play sports, with running especially important. Sorley, with his background as a good schoolboy runner, helped train the men of his Suffolk Regiment, mostly farm workers. He prepared them especially for the divisional cross country championship in Kent against other regiments. The favorites were a formidable Royal Fusiliers team that contained (Sorley wrote in a letter) several experienced cross country runners (“ex-harriers”).
There were 400 starters and 12 teams. Afterward the young officer/coach reported with glee that on “a heavy course over the rich Kentish soil. … The Suffolks came in an easy first. This has been one of many triumphs.”
It’s good to know that a poem that has been taken to be about runners in a remote and idealized world in fact derived from real training for a particular race, when his guys got up and beat the favorites. It is no stretch of the imagination that a 19-year-old who loved running so much, and who was well liked by his men, would run with them in training instead of just holding the watch. The poem’s “We” surely includes the poet. It expresses a group unity more fundamental than the military separation between lieutenant and infantrymen.
So “The Song of the Ungirt Runners” is both timeless and very much of its time—as the best poems are. It affirms the elemental, its runners swinging through a nature of primordial power, yet it also reflects on its moment in history. Its condemnation is implied, not spelled out. But imagine writing of men who were about to be ordered to march in step into the narrow dark pit of the trench that:
And we run because we like it
Through the broad bright land.
The full poem is here:
The Song of the Ungirt Runners
We swing ungirded hips
And lighten’d are our eyes,
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
We know not whom we trust
Nor whitherward we fare,
But we run because we must
Through the great wide air.
The waters of the seas
Are troubled as by storm.
The tempest strips the trees
And does not leave them warm.
Does the tearing tempest pause?
Do the tree-tops ask it why?
So we run without a cause
’Neath the big bare sky.
The rain is on our lips,
We do not run for prize.
But the storm the water whips
And the wave howls to the skies.
The winds arise and strike it
And scatter it like sand,
And we run because we like it
Through the broad bright land.
Sadly Charles Sorley was killed by a sniper’s bullet a few weeks after arriving at the front in France, aged 20. In his pack was found the draft of a poem that has become his most famous, beginning with the lines:
When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go …
Within days of writing these lines, this talented young poet was himself among the mouthless dead. It is some consolation that he found pleasure in his last weeks by running and had time to put that pleasure into life-affirming words that still retain their resonant simplicity.
At the opposite extreme from Sorley’s runners, who know not “whitherward we fare,” is the focused purpose of the fiery-eyed race winner, seizing the moment of the finishing straight, in a running sonnet by John Masefield:
The Racer
I saw the racer coming to the jump,
Staring with fiery eyeballs as he rusht,
I heard the blood within his body thump,
I saw him launch, I heard the toppings crusht.
And as he landed I beheld his soul
Kindle, because, in front, he saw the Straight
With all its thousands roaring at the goal,
He laughed, he took the moment for his mate.
Would that the passionate moods on which we ride
Might kindle thus to oneness with the will;
Would we might see the end to which we stride,
And feel, not strain, in struggle, only thrill.
And laugh like him and know in all our nerves
Beauty, the spirit, scattering dust and turves.
John Masefield (1878–1967) was a prolific English poet, best known probably for sea poems like “Cargoes” and “Sea Fever,” and he was Britain’s poet laureate from 1930. “The Racer,” written in about 1920, refers to the finish of a cross country or perhaps track steeplechase, since there are jumps and the last line suggests that the finish is on grass.