Other Men's Flowers

Nothing but the thread that binds them, is my own: Montaigne

Sometimes I wonder what on earth I will write about each week. Subscribers may have noticed a certain amount of ‘cheating’ recently: a guest post by my beloved brother, a certain amount of re-posting and re-working of my very earliest pieces…I have excuses - a glorious roadtrip in South-west USA was never going to be conducive to drafting Substacks. Also I am in limbo - with Literature for the People well and truly launched and in the hands of the bookseller Gods (and the judges of a certain Scottish literary prize), I do have a plan for a new project but I’m not off to the races yet, as they say.

But suddenly today the stars have aligned - prompted by posts from two fellow Substackers, both of which have made me think about how some poems find us and stick with us from our earliest days, becoming a secret soundtrack to our lives, and how everybody’s personal canon is different.

Victoria

posted this week with poems by Yeats, Arnold, and Day Lewis, none of which I had ever heard before, all truly lovely. And while I was thinking about this, and about the poems which have been with me, some of them for fifty years or more now, I spotted a volume on our bookshelf which I had never really noticed before: Other Men’s Flowers, selected and annotated by a military hero of the Second World War, Lord Wavell.

I have to start my survey of poetry anthologies by paying tribute to

Jeremy Noel-Tod

who pointed out that this weekend marks the bicentenary of one of the most successful anthologists of all time, and certainly of the Victorian era. Francis Turner Palgrave was commissioned by Alexander Macmillan to edit a collection of poetry, published in 1861 under the title The Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language. I love the definitive nature of the title: this is not just some personal selection (although of course it was…and there are many strange omissions, mostly on grounds of Victorian sensibilities, or prudery, if you like) but THE BEST SONGS AND POEMS. Full stop.

The book flew off the shelves, ten thousand copies in six months, partly assisted by the rumour that the poems had in fact all been chosen by Alfred Lord Tennyson, a man for whom Palgrave had an undisguised admiration, even adoration. It was a title which cemented the arrival of Macmillan & Co as one of the foremost Victorian publishers, and it heralded a whole series of anthologies and collections which sold well for the firm: Roundell’s Book of Praise, Coventry Patmore’s The Children’s Garland, Allingham’s Book of Ballads, Mark Lemon’s The Jest Book, Diana Mulock’s The Fairy Book, and Mrs Alexander’s Sunday Book of Poetry for the Young. Here is Jeremy’s excellent essay on the subject.

There have been many poetry anthologies since then, some distinguished by their particular focus, some by the identity of the editor. I am particularly fond of Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times, and Daisy Goodwin’s collections, such as this one:

In 1941, Lord Wavell (Field-Marshall Earl Wavell), decided to make a list of his favourite poems. It was quite a busy time for Archibald Percival Wavell: a professional soldier, he had been serving as the British Army’s Commander-in-Chief, Middle East, essentially defending North and East Africa against the Italians and Germans, and was now being posted to India as Commander-in-Chief there, just at the point when the Japanese entered the war. He signed off the first edition from New Delhi in 1943, admitting that unsurprisingly he had had less opportunity for poetry reading during the war. It’s a huge collection, perhaps 500 poems, lots of Kipling, Chesterton and Browning, no Tennyson or Wordsworth, only half a dozen women, and very much reflective of the man who had been educated at Winchester and Sandhurst. The most impressive point is that Wavell claims that he was once able to recite every one of them. As it contains a number of very long poems, such as a favourite of mine, Kipling’s The Mary Gloster, this is admirable if true.

Learning poetry off by heart is a declining art. I had to do it at school, I’ve since done it by choice: it gets harder with age. But it was something that both my parents, educated in the 1930s had done, and the poems that they had loved, and had recited to each other in courtship, became part of our family life, passed on to my children. My older kids are in their thirties now, but if I interrupted a family dinner by banging on the table ‘Drake he’s in his hammock and a thousand miles away’, I believe they would all happily shout ‘Cap’n, art thou sleeping there below?’… My father loved Kipling’s If, he loved Sir Henry Newbolt, and best of all he loved Vitai Lampada, ‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight, ten to make and a match to win…’

I can still remember my mother teaching me Chesterton’s The Donkey:

When fishes flew and forests walked

And figs grew upon thorn,

Some moment when the moon was blood

   Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry

   And ears like errant wings,

The devil’s walking parody

   On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,

   Of ancient crooked will;

Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,

   I keep my secret still.

Fools! For I also had my hour;

   One far fierce hour and sweet:

There was a shout about my ears,

   And palms before my feet.

I taught it to my children, and I still feel so sorry for our vicar, who planned a whole afternoon with the children at the local primary school to talk about this poem, and without revealing the title, to get them to guess what it was about. He had only got as far as ‘When fishes flew’ when my little daughter shouted with joy ‘It’s a donkey’! How on earth did he fill the rest of the lesson.

My eldest daughter is now a poet, a Foyle Young Poet prizewinner, who also had a Poem on the Underground

Today she is married to James who has a master’s degree in poetry, and has a baby daughter of her own. It won’t be long before little Daisy is learning poetry at her mother’s knee.

When I was a teenager I began to collate my own anthology: I still have the precious orange notebook on my desk right now, and when I flick through the carefully-written pages I still love what I chose. There’s a good mixture, from Sir Walter Raleigh’s Even such is time, that takes in trust, our youth, our joys and all we have. and pays us but with age and dust… (I notice Lord Wavell liked that too!), through Wordsworth and Tennyson, who Lord Wavell did NOT love, lots of Larkin and MacNeice, right through to Roger McGough’s Summer with Monica and Brian Patten. For those of you interested in my next project, sandwiched between these well-known names, the Shakespeare and the Rupert Brooke, is Mary Wilson’s passionate poem of illicit love ‘Oh that we might for one brief hour, forget that we are bound apart…’ I have always loved that poem, and wanted to know more about the woman who wrote it.

So, back to Lord Wavell. From 1943 to 1947 he wa Viceroy of India, and then President of The Royal Society of Literature. Quite the career swerve! His collection was reissued in 1947, when, as he said, he hoped that

‘it may continue to give some pleasure and afford some help in these difficult days. I have a great belief in the inspiration of poetry towards courage and vision and in its driving power. And we want all the courage and vision at our command, in days of crisis when our future prosperity and greatness hang in the balance.’

He died in 1950, at the age of sixty-seven, and two years later his son, who had encouraged him to have the book published ten years earlier, wrote an introduction to a memorial edition:

A soldier and the son of a soldier has no settled home and, after all the travel and turmoil are over, his body lies in the peaceful cloister garth at Winchester, played to its rest at the close of a summer’s day by a Piper of his beloved regiment.

These are the words of Wavell’s son, Archibald John Arthur Wavell, later 2nd Earl Wavell, written in 1952. On 24 December 1953, he was killed in Kenya, in an action against Mau Mau rebels.

By PicturePrince - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34233709