[Tim Murphy]

Dickenson is a genius at this sort of poem.

The bustle in the house
the morning after death
is solemnist of industries
enacted upon earth.

The sweeping up the heart
and putting love away
we shall not want to use again
until eternity.

Let me point out that in Suzanne Doyle and Rhina Espaillat, our co-hosts, we have two women leading the discussion who excel in looking firmly at our frayed condition with compassion. Thanks for that Browning poem, Alicia.

Here are my thoughts on a poem I fell in love with in childhood, now think is fundamentally wrong-headed, but still love.

Fern Hill

I suspect that the first time I heard Fern Hill I was seated beside my father, by a pond, waiting for sunset ducks. I was too young to carry a gun but big enough to put on waders and set forth decoys. There wasn’t a duck in sight, and my father said:


Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

I must have been about ten years old, and I was a small town boy. My father was the real deal, a farm boy, a superb reciter of poetry. The poem simply blew me apart, with its change of direction from recollection of happy youth to its grim reflection on the exigencies of age, which I was very far from! It is a poem to which I have returned for some decades.

I am now twenty years older than Thomas was the night he died of too many martinis, an undiagnosed diabetic, whom a heroic dose of insulin might have saved. What a loss. When I embarked on the path to poet at seventeen I was horribly derivative of Thomas. I’m over that, but I still recite that great singer with pleasure.

As I look back on my life at 59, I suspect that Thomas has it all wrong. Childhood for me was perplexity and unhappiness. Relatively late in life, at age 54, my life was taken over by the Holy Spirit, and I no longer “sing in my chains like the sea.” I have an image of Dylan Thomas, drunkenly sobbing on my living master’s couch shortly before he died: “I am washed up, still going on the inspiration I had at seventeen.”

Mr. Thomas, your poetry woke me from my sleep to a vast intoxication in our art. However derivative of you I might have been at seventeen, I never, ever drink martinis.