Several affectionate tributes have been paid to Cornish poet Charles Causley on the occasion of his recent death. There's a detailed biographical and critical essay by Dana Gioia on the Net, and on other sites samples of his poetry.
A primary schoolteacher for thirty years, he wrote for children as well as adults - mostly in traditional forms, especially the ballad. Much of his best work e.g. 'Timothy Winter' combines humour, shrewd observation and compassion. Of his free verse pieces, Ten Types of Hospital Visitor is among the most hilarious. He was a close friend of Ted Hughes and the novelist/dramatist Susan Hill, whose poignant memoir can be read at books.guardian.co.uk She quotes this short elegy for a sailor and personal acquaintance of Causley's who died in WW2. CONVOY Draw the blanket of ocean Over his frozen face. He lies, his eyes quarried by glittering fish, Staring through the green freezing sea-glass At the Northern Lights, He is now a child in the land of Christmas: Watching, amazed, the white tumbling bears And the diving seal. The iron wind clangs round the ice-caps, The five-point Dog-star Burns over the silent sea, And the three ships Come sailing in. Margaret Moore |
Margaret
I don't know this poet but see why you are affected by his work. This is beautiful. (I have a dear Cornish poet-friend with whom I have lost touch--Trevor Hewett--he could have written this.) Thanks for letting me know about him. Janet Here's the link to Gioa's article. http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecausley.htm [This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited December 02, 2003).] |
Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience
by Charles Causley I had a silver penny And an apricot tree And I said to the sailor On the white quay 'Sailor O sailor Will you bring me If I give you my penny And my apricot tree A fez from Algeria An Arab drum to beat A little gilt sword And a parakeet?' And he smiled and he kissed me As strong as death And I saw his red tongue And I felt his sweet breath 'You may keep your penny And your apricot tree And I'll bring your presents Back from the sea.' O, the ship dipped down On the rim of the sky And I waited while three Long summers went by Then one steel morning On the white quay I saw a grey ship Come in from the sea Slowly she came Across the bay For her flashing rigging Was shot away All round her wake The seabirds cried And flew in and out Of the hole in her side Slowly she came In the path of the sun And I heard the sound Of a distant gun And a stranger came running Up to me From the deck of the ship And he said, said he 'O are you the boy Who would wait on the quay With the silver penny And the apricot tree? I've a plum-coloured fez And a drum for thee And a sword and a parakeet From over the sea.' 'O where is the sailor With the bold red hair? And what is that volley On the bright air? O where are the other Girls and boys? And why have you brought me Children's toys?' |
Given Charles Causley’s recent death, perhaps this moving, skilful and subtly allusive poem about his parents is an appropriate one to post. He is a very fine poet indeed.
Eden Rock They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock: My father, twenty-five, in the same suit Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack Still two years old and trembling at his feet. My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat, Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass. Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light. She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue. The sky whitens as if lit by three suns. My mother shades her eyes and looks my way Over the drifted stream. My father spins A stone along the water. Leisurely, They beckon to me from the other bank. I hear them call, "See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think." I had not thought that it would be like this. Charles Causley 1917 - 2003 Note: H. P. Sauce is a brand of brown sauce well-known in Britain. ... Clive Watkins |
Lovely poem. Such subtle near rhymes. I remember Harold Wilson and HP Sauce ;) Why didn't I know this man before?
Janet HRAR Love the poem for children. Janet [This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited December 03, 2003).] |
A review I did of Causley some years ago:
Secret Destinations: Selected Poems 1977-1988 By Charles Causley David R. Godine 115 pp. $9.95 paper ISBN: 0-87923-739-2 When Charles Causley's Collected Poems was published in 1975, reviewers in American magazines generally praised his work but somehow managed to relegate him to the limbo of minor poets. By focusing on his mastery of the ballad, they may have given the impression of a Johnny One-Note who, in his idiosyncratic disregard for the main currents of modernism, was engaged in an attempt to write as if Pound and Eliot had not existed. Here, in the opening stanzas of a poem in a characteristic mode, Causley chronicles the fortunes of errant youth: My friend Maloney, eighteen, Swears like a sentry, Got into trouble two years back With the local gentry. Parson and squire's sons Informed a copper. The magistrate took one look at Maloney. Fixed him proper. This is squarely in the honorable line of descent that begins with the anonymous folk ballads of the late Middle Ages and counts among its later scions Davidson and Hardy. But what is one to make of verse like this, with its comic rhymes and erratic meters, when it issues from a poet of the present day? The tradition of English modernism, while catholic enough to include both the intellectualism and discursiveness of Eliot and Auden and the musical and rhetorical flourishes of Thomas and Barker, establishes few precedents for this sort of faux-naif plainsong. The equivalent American approach would be to frame the observations in the abrupt cadences and unadorned idiom of William Carlos Williams, as if to say that authenticity in dealing with the Common Man is arrived at only by avoiding the poetic forms he has chosen for himself. Our own American balladeers, caught between the rock of the literary magazines, which are not likely to give any space to anything as reactionary-sounding as a ballad, and the hard place of no alternatives for publication in the popular press, have forsaken the slopes of Parnassus for the lounges of Nashville. Perhaps Causley is fortunate to receive a hearing at all. Secret Destinations: Selected Poems 1977-1988 provides a generous sample of recent work from a poet, now in his seventies and writing beautifully, who clearly deserves our respect. At this late stage in his career, Causley is not likely to become American poetry's current pet Brit (the job has been vacant since the death of Larkin), but readers here should respond well to his best poems and forgive his infrequent lapses. He is a craftsman who employs a variety of formal strategies, from rhymed pentameters to free verse, in an attempt to match form with content; few American poets demonstrate such versatility. Generally, his poems contain strong narrative elements and avoid the subjective personalism that is the bane of too much contemporary poetry. It is possible that his idiom will slow the American reader ("Today / I see the naked-footed children trawl / The dam for yabbies...."), but for the most part the surfaces of his poems are simple and unobstructed. Causley has been called "England's Robert Frost," though the comparison is ultimately without basis; trying to imagine an English Frost is about as impossible as summoning up, say, an American Larkin. What he lacks, the element that ultimately raises Larkin to greatness, is a unifying vision: the terrors of existential aloneness that make Larkin's poems on bachelorhood (a subject largely unexplored in American poetry) so memorable. A poet who takes his religion seriously, Causley often explores Christian subjects and themes but, to cite another well-known countryman, his work in this vein lacks the tension of poet-clergyman R.S. Thomas's poetry. Outside of his ballads, which are not much in evidence in the current collection, he lacks a single distinctive quality -- of tone, of idiom, or of sound -- that might set his poems apart from those of any number of skilled poets. The quality of the work is high, to be sure, but there is no "Mr. Bleaney" or "Church-Going" here crying out to be read again and again. Causley was born in 1917, and his many poems about his youth and extended family rank among his finest. The England of his childhood was filled with the human wreckage of the Great War. "Dick Lander," a veteran who, according to one of the poet's playmates, is "shell-shopped," daily stands on a corner "playing a game of trains with match-boxes." The poem concludes with a childish prank: At firework time we throw a few at Dick. Shout, 'Here comes Kaiser Bill!' Dick stares us through As if we're glass. We yell, 'What did you do In the Great War?' And skid into the dark. 'Choo, choo,' says Dick. 'Choo, choo, choo, choo, choo, choo.' One relative recalled is "Uncle Stan," who died in a military training camp in British Columbia. "He might have been a farmer; swallowed mud / At Vimy, Cambrai," muses the poet, "But a Canadian winter got him first." Most painful are memories of the poet's father, an invalid who died when he was seven: "Once again my dead / Father stood there: army boots bright as glass, / Offering me a hand as colourless / As phosgene." In poems like these one hears second-generation echoes of Sassoon and Graves. Since his retirement from teaching, Causley has traveled extensively. Several poems draw on Australian locales, "A detritus / Of boomerangs and bells and whips and saddles." The focus of his descriptions, however, is more often than not on people instead of landscape. "Grandmother" describes a Czech-German survivor of wartime dislocations who "guillotines salami with a hand / Veined like Silesia." "Bamboo Dance" describes a frenetic Filipino combination of music, movement, physical danger, and love: The dance is love, love is the dance Though bamboo shocks their dancing day. Ceases. Smiling, the dancers go, Hand locked in gentle hand, their way. At "Gelibolu" (the Turkish name for Gallipoli) he goes beneath the surface, sensing the presence of history: "But this is savaged air. Is poisoned ground. / Unstilled, the dead, the living voices sound, / And now the night breaks open like a wound." Aside from Hardy and Landor, it is hard to think of other poets in their seventies who have written this well. In the book's final poem, "Eden Rock," Causley imagines a reunion with his parents, "mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress," and "father, twenty-five, in the same suit / Of Genuine Irish Tweed." The call for the poet to be gathered to the bosom of his elders is phrased in restrained measures: The sky whitens as if lit by three suns. My mother shades her eyes and looks my way Over the drifted stream. My father spins A stone along the water. Leisurely, They beckon to me from the other bank. I hear them call, 'See where the stream-path is! Crossing is not as hard as you might think.' I had not thought that it would be like this. There is a valedictory tone that runs through these haunting lines. In Charles Causley's case one can only hope that it is premature. -- R.S. Gwynn |
Great article, Sam. Thanks for posting this. I know Charles Causley's work quite well, but have not read a great deal ABOUT it - all I can remember is an interview about twenty years ago. He was certainly a good hand with a ballad and much of his work seems to deal with people lost of damaged by the two world wars. This is a favourite of mine.
A Ballad for Katharine of Aragon As I walked down by the river Down by the frozen fen I saw the grey cathedral With the eyes of a child of ten. O the railway arch is smoky As the Flying Scot goes by And but for the Education Act Go Jumper Cross and I. But war is a bitter bugle That all must learn to blow And it didn't take long to stop the song In the dirty Italian snow.. O war is a casual mistress And the world is her double bed She has a few charms in her mechanised arms But you wake up and find yourself dead. The olive tree in winter Casts her banner down And the priest in white and scarlet Comes up from the muddy town. O never more will Jumper Watch the Flying Scot go by His funeral knell was a six-inch shell Singing across the sky. The Queen of Castile has a daughter Who won't come home again She lies in the grey cathedral under the arms of Spain. O the Queen of Castile has a daughter Torn out by the roots. Her lovely breast in a stone cold chest Under the farmers' boots. Now I like a Spanish party And many O many the day I have watched them swim as the night came dim On Algeciras Bay. O the high sierra was thunder And the seven-branched river of Spain Came down to the sea to plunder The heart of the sailor again. O shall I leap in the river And knock upon paradise door For a gunner of twenty-seven and a half And a queen of twenty-four? From the almond-tree by the river I watch the sky with a groan For Jumper and Kate are always out late And I lie here alone. |
Thanks for that one Oliver.
Janet (Edited in. R. S. Gwynn I don't know why I didn't say how much I appreciated your article. Very fine. Thanks for posting it. Janet [This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited December 07, 2003).] |
I am very sorry to hear of his death. With Richard Murphy, he is one of the two contemporaries whose books I most need to acquire. Many thanks, Sam, for posting your review, which I hadn't seen. What I HAVE seen is always arresting in a fresh sort of way.
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Fascinating responses , which I look forward to reading at leisure in a couple of weeks' time. I gather that when CC saw the K of Aragon tomb (when training as a teacher in Peterborough) he misinterpreted the latter date on the inscription as her death date - not the year in which she ceased to be Henry VIII's Queen.
Margaret. |
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