First of all, a quick preliminary note. For some reason, I have gained a large number of substack “followers” this week. The follower/subscriber distinction is a bit confusing, so this is just a reminder that if you want to receive the weekly Horace & friends piece automatically as an email, you need to subscribe to the substack (not just follow me). (I believe that if you do already subscribe, you are automatically also a “follower”.) As I mentioned a while ago, I will be restricting full access to the archive to paid subscribers from the middle of October, but the weekly piece will remain free to all. (And for now, everything is still free anyway.)
At the start of this term my middle son, who’s nine, started rugby training for the first time. (For my US readers, I believe the rules of rugby are similar to those of American football, except that American football is played wearing a rather impressive kind of helmet and shoulder pads, while rugby is played wearing shorts, a T-shirt and — in a generous concession to the inevitable mud and blood — some extra long socks.) This means that my schedule is now punctuated with trips south to the training pitch for his club, down at the bottom of the 14th arrondissement, by the périphérique (the main Paris ring road, which separates the twenty arrondissements of the city itself from the inner suburbs). This was all quite pleasant up until last week, as Paris has been enjoying something of an Indian summer, though it’s been raining pretty steadily for the last few days and with my sensible mac, umbrella and waterproof bag containing milk-and-biscuits and a dry jumper, I am beginning to feel like a real “rugby mum”.
When I was at school, football and rugby were very definitely for boys, not girls. (Girls played rounders, netball and hockey; though for health reasons I couldn’t do any sport myself after about the age my son is now.) I don’t know much about either football or rugby but have been surprised to find rugby much more fun to watch than football. Points are scored quite frequently, for a start, and you can visually track the progress of its attritional warfare as one team edges its way up the pitch. Watching them play reminded me of Cecil Day-Lewis’ well-known attempt to capture how each September sees children take a step away from you, further into their own world:
It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day —
A sunny day with leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled — since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting awayBehind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.
That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature’s give-and-take — the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show —
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.
Day-Lewis was the UK poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. Despite a hefty complete poems published in 1992, his poetry has now, I think, fallen almost completely out of circulation — perhaps partly for the depressingly simple reason that very few of his poems can be read easily online. This neglect seems to me rather unfair, as he wrote a lot of lovely lyrics.1 (If you want to speculate on which, if any, of the subsequent UK poet laureates will prove to have a lasting reputation, here’s a complete list.)
‘Walking Away’ is actually not a very typical Day-Lewis poem, but you can see why it has become an anthology piece. Recalling it as I sat by an actual pitch, watching my own ‘half-fledged’ son embark upon a new activity and discovering a new aspect of himself, I thought that the power of this particular poem derives partly from the way it combines such a recognisable parenting experience with the distance of time. Day-Lewis is not writing in the poetic present, but recalling an experience, albeit at the same time of year: ‘It is 18 years ago, almost to the day’.
Hovering beneath the surface of the poem, I think, is Yeats’ best known poem of autumnal nostalgia, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, set nineteen (rather than eighteen) years after its initial occasion and also an attempt to articulate how — as Robert Frost put it — ‘nothing gold can stay’. Here we have moved from September to October:
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
But perhaps I have personal reasons, too, for associating Day-Lewis’ little poem about fledgling independence with Yeats’ swans. Any parent will recognise, I suppose, the peculiar satisfaction of seeing a child try a new activity that immediately looks “right”: my son may or may not stick with rugby as he grows up, but watching him, even on the first or second session, I could see that trying it was teaching him something new about himself, about what he enjoyed and was capable of. As a parent you are always trying to do this for your children. It can be quite a feat of imagination — as a child myself, I would have hated pretty much every single aspect of rugby — and most of the time it doesn’t quite work out.
I discovered most of the poetry I know and love by myself, but I first read ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ with my mother, when I was about 12. I was horribly bored and friendless at school and fed up. My mother, who tutored A level English students at home in the evenings, suggested, I suppose to cheer me up, that we look at one of the A level texts together and this was the poem she showed me — that she gave me, really, because I have known it ever since and it is one of those poems that comes so readily to mind (trees are, after all, very often in their autumn beauty) that you carry it around. I remember just where we were sitting when we read this poem together but I also remember not really knowing what to say about it. (And what can you say, really, in response to such a perfect poem, other than to memorise it greedily and immediately?) From her point of view it might have been a rather disappointing discussion and I fear I didn’t thank her either for showing it to me. (Thank you, Mum!)
Rugby is named, of course, for Rugby School (in Rugby in Warwickshire), where the game was supposedly invented in 1823 when one boy picked up the ball while playing football and ran with it. (History doesn’t record what happened next, but given how rugby works, I’m guessing that all the other players promptly tackled him to the ground and they all enjoyed rolling around in the mud for a while, fighting over the ball.) There may not be any good poem about this event, but there is a very good poem about Rugby School (or rather its Chapel): Matthew Arnold’s strange and stirring poem written in memory of his father, Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School, fifteen years after his death in 1842 — a similar temporal gap to the one in both the Day-Lewis and Yeats poems. As this is a long poem, I’ve given just the beginning but you can read the whole thing here. We are still in autumn, but later again now, into November. As belated thank-yous go, this is a pretty extravagant and atmospheric one:
Coldly, sadly descends
The autumn-evening. The field
Strewn with its dank yellow drifts
Of wither'd leaves, and the elms,
Fade into dimness apace,
Silent;—hardly a shout
From a few boys late at their play!
The lights come out in the street,
In the school-room windows;—but cold,
Solemn, unlighted, austere,
Through the gathering darkness, arise
The chapel-walls, in whose bound
Thou, my father! art laid.There thou dost lie, in the gloom
Of the autumn evening. But ah!
That word, gloom, to my mind
Brings thee back, in the light
Of thy radiant vigour, again;
In the gloom of November we pass'd
Days not dark at thy side;
Seasons impair'd not the ray
Of thy buoyant cheerfulness clear.
Such thou wast! and I stand
In the autumn evening, and think
Of bygone autumns with thee.Fifteen years have gone round
Since thou arosest to tread,
In the summer-morning, the road
Of death, at a call unforeseen,
Sudden. For fifteen years,
We who till then in thy shade
Rested as under the boughs
Of a mighty oak, have endured
Sunshine and rain as we might,
Bare, unshaded, alone,
Lacking the shelter of thee.
There’s a lot to say about this rather remarkable poem (and indeed about Arnold’s poetry in general). But for now I’d like to think just about the metre. When I hear or read people — often though not only American “formalists” — discussing “correct” metre in English, and the supposed dominance of accentual-syllabic forms in general and the iambic pentameter in particular, I often think rather impatiently of poets like Arnold and Yeats. Arnold’s verse is musical, highly memorable and — to my ears at least — mostly very straightforward to speak correctly. But it’s often not very iambic at all and he typically uses lines of very varying syllable length. ‘Rugby Chapel’ is a good example of this — its pattern is, technically speaking, more trochaic (rugby) than iambic (endured), the trochaic pattern is established very clearly at the outset (‘Coldly, sadly descends’) and the lines have between six and nine syllables each. If you (inexplicably) wanted to spend an hour “scanning” it you’d find a complex variety of combinations of stressed and unstressed syllables. But its music is easy to hear and read, and very easy to remember, because regardless of the number of the syllables all the lines have three stresses.
Repeated three-stress lines are relatively unusual in English, especially in longer poems, but the four-stress line is very common, perhaps in fact the most natural English line of all, and indeed a lot of so-called iambic pentameter has a tendency to drift towards four rather than five stresses. ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’ establishes an iambic pattern at the outset (‘The trees are in their autumn beauty / The woodland paths are dry’) but is in stanzas of 4/3/4/3/5/3 stresses, with quite varied syllable length and relatively few perfectly iambic lines. Day-Lewis’ poem, by contrast, looks to the eye like it might be iambic pentameter, since the line-length hovers around 10 syllables (ranging from 9 to 12). But most of the lines are spoken naturally with four stresses, not five (‘A sunny day, with leaves just turning’; ‘Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away’), and only a handful of lines certainly have five.
As far as I know — do comment if you can think of any counter-examples — there are no really good poems about rugby itself, so the poems I discussed today were just those which came into my mind as I watched the practices. None of these English poems are obscure — all are by poets who were considered major in their own lifetime, and all three have been very well-known at some point even if they are not now — and not one of them is in iambic pentameter. In fact, not one of them is obviously in a ‘syllabic’ metre, strictly speaking, at all (as in the familiar statement that traditional English verse is ‘accentual-syllabic’, i.e. where both the number of stresses and the number of syllables are set by the metrical pattern). These poems, like a great deal of English poetry, establish and follow an accentual pattern — of a certain number of stresses in a line, though this too is open to variation — but not, or only very loosely, a syllabic one. Verse of this kind is very common in the English tradition, and the hundred years of poetry between the mid-19th and mid-20th century, even if you set aside the full-blown “modernists” completely, is particularly rich in metrical variety. It is puzzling that this is not better reflected in most discussions of English metre and form. But the best way to get a feel for the actual — rather than imagined — conventions of a literary tradition is, of course, by reading it; and then, perhaps, by waiting to see what comes to mind while watching a group of 9 year olds learning how to knock one another over under the Parisian rain.
If you want to explore, the Complete Poems is available on the Internet Archive.
In the days before football displaced baseball as the national pastime, most Americans were probably familiar with “Casey at the Bat”:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45398/casey-at-the-bat
Since it’s a comic, narrative poem, I suppose the long iambic lines are almost required. I still remember watching a TV cartoon set to this poem.
I like how colloquial it is, mixing in common baseball slang. For example, if an inning ends with runners on base, they’re said to have “died” there.
I was intrigued by the splendid photo (although it is gulls, not swans, that are seen actually in flight…) and wondered if it showed Coole Park*. Checking Coole Park up I discovered that the swans found there are not the usual mute swan found in parks all over Europe, but Bewick’s swans and, more recently, whooper swans - both a rarer sight in Éire, the UK or France. Both are a smaller birds; I wonder if this alters the (my) sense of the poem, which invites the image of grand, stately creatures?
* it doesn’t.