Poems Mentioned, or Cited in
Part, in Ian McEwan’s Novel, “Nutshell”
Page Numbers Refer to Anchor Books Paperback, 2017
Michael Drayton
Since
there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.
Nay, I
have done, you get no more of me;
And I am
glad, yea glad with all my heart,
That thus
so cleanly I myself can free.
Shake
hands for ever, cancel all our vows,
And when
we meet at any time again,
Be it not
seen in either of our brows
That we
one jot of former love retain.
Now at
the last gasp of Love’s latest breath,
When, his
pulse failing, Passion speechless lies;
When
Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And
Innocence is closing up his eyes—
Now, if
thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might’st him yet recover!
Nutshell, beginning of Ch. 9, p. 82-84, FN (Fetus
Narrator) writes a letter to his father, John Cairncross: “There was a poem you
recited then, too good for one of yours, I think you’d be the first to concede.
Short, dense, bitter to the point of resignation, difficult to understand. The
sort that hits you, hurts you, before you’ve followed exactly what was said. It
addressed a careless, indifferent reader, a lost lover, a real person, I should
think. In fourteen lines it talked of hopeless attachment, wretched
preoccupation, longing unresolved and unacknowledged. It summoned a rival,
mighty in talent or social rank or both. Eventually, time would have its
revenge, but no one would care or even remember, unless they chanced to read
these lines.”
FN spends the rest of the letter applying the poem to
himself and the world he is about to enter. In the last paragraph come these
lines: “So say it again to me, this poem, with your dying breath, and I’ll say
it back to you. Let it be the last thing you ever hear. Then you’ll know what I
mean.”
A few pages later, in Ch. 10 (p. 91-92), just minutes before
Trudy poisons him, John recites the Drayton poem to her again; the first line
and three other lines are cited on p. 91. Trudy does not bother listening; she “talks
over the last few words,” and then declares: “I don’t want to hear another poem
for the rest of my life.” John answers, “You won’t; not with Claude.”
John Donne
A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
As virtuous men pass
mildly away,
And
whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad
friends do say
The
breath goes now, and some say, No:
So let us melt, and make
no noise,
No
tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our
joys
To tell
the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings
harms and fears,
Men
reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though
greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers'
love
(Whose
soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth
remove
Those
things which elemented it.
But we by a love so much
refined,
That our
selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care
less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore,
which are one,
Though I
must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an
expansion,
Like
gold to airy thinness beat.
If they be two, they are
two so
As stiff
twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot,
makes no show
To move,
but doth, if the other do.
And though it in the
center sit,
Yet when
the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens
after it,
And
grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me,
who must,
Like th'
other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my
circle just,
And
makes me end where I begun.
Nutshell, Ch. 10, in the scene of the poisoning (p. 93), after he declaims the
Drayton poem “John Cairncross may be considering [declaiming] one last poem. He
could wheel out, as he used to before journeys, ‘A Valediction Forbidding
Mourning.’ Those soothing tetrameters, that mature, comforting tone, would make
me nostalgic for the sad old days of his visits. But instead he drums his
fingers on the table, clears his throat, and simply waits.”
d
Shakespeare,
Richard II
Act
2 Scene 1
50This
blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming
womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed
and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds
as far from home,
For Christian service
and true chivalry,
55As
is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s ransom,
blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear
souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation
through the world,
Is now leased out, I die
pronouncing it,
60Like
to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with
the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats
back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is
now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and
rotten parchment bonds:
65That
England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful
conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal
vanish with my life,
How happy then were my
ensuing death!
Still in the poisoning
scene of Nutshell, Ch. 10, p. 94, John, Trudy and Claude discuss briefly
the problem of the migrants pressing in on England, and apropos of that, John
recites the following lines: “Ah, England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege.”
d
Andrew Marvell
To
His Coy Mistress
Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which
way
To walk, and pass our long love’s
day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the
tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the
flood,
And you should, if you please,
refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to
praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead
gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your
heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying
near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall
sound
My echoing song; then worms shall
try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to
dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private
place,
But none, I think, do there
embrace.
Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul
transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of
prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped
power.
Let us roll all our strength and
all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough
strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our
sun
Stand still, yet we will make him
run.
In Chapter 15 of Nutshell (p.
145), after a long digression on “the new politics in university life”—the issue involves trigger warnings, the demand
of students for a safe place, the refusal to entertain “dangerous” ideas—FN
remarks, “The womb, or this womb, isn’t such a bad place, a little like the
grave, ‘fine and private’ in one of my father’s favourite poems.” The full
quotation from two lines in Marvell would be, “The grave’s a fine and private
place,/But none, I think, do there embrace.”
d
W.H. Auden
Autumn Song
Now the leaves
are falling fast,
Nurse’s flowers
will not last;
Nurses to the
graves are gone,
And the prams go
rolling on.
Whispering
neighbours, left and right,
Pluck us from the
real delight;
And the active
hands must freeze
Lonely on the
separate knees.
Dead in hundreds
at the back
Follow wooden in
our track,
Arms raised
stiffly to reprove
In false
attitudes of love.
Starving through
the leafless wood
Trolls run
scolding for their food;
And the
nightingale is dumb,
And the angel
will not come.
Cold, impossible,
ahead
Lifts the
mountain’s lovely head
Whose white
waterfall could bless
Travellers in
their last distress.
After John’s
death, in Ch. 16 (p. 151) of Nutshell Elodie recalls, for Claude and
Trudy, what a great teacher of poetry he was. Among numerous examples: “He set
the assignment for the week ahead—a poem in four stanzas of trochaic
tetrameters catalectic. We laughed at this gobbledygook. He had us singing an
example, a nursery rhyme. ‘Boys and girls come out to play.’ Then he recited
from memory Auden’s ‘Autumn Song.’ ‘Now the leaves are falling fast,/Nurse’s
flowers will not last.’ Why is the missing syllable at the end of the line so
effective?”
d
John Betjeman
Indoor Games Near
Newbury
In
among the silver birches,
Winding ways of tarmac wander
And the signs to Bussock Bottom,
Tussock Wood and Windy Break.
Gabled lodges, tile-hung churches
Catch the lights of our Lagonda
As we drive to Wendy’s party,
Lemon curd and Christmas cake
Rich the makes of motor whirring
Past the pine plantation purring
Come up Hupmobile Delage.
Short the way our chauffeurs travel
Crunching over private gravel,
Each from out his warm garage.
O but Wendy, when the carpet
Yielded to my indoor pumps.
There you stood, your gold hair streaming,
Handsome in the hall light gleaming
There you looked and there you led me
Off into the game of Clumps.
Then the new Victrola playing;
And your funny uncle saying
"Choose your partners for a foxtrot.
Dance until it's tea o'clock
Come on young 'uns, foot it feetly."
Was it chance that paired us neatly?
I who loved you so completely.
You who pressed me closely to you,
Hard against your party frock.
"Meet me when you've finished eating."
So we met and no one found us.
O that dark and furry cupboard,
While the rest played hide-and-seek.
Holding hands our two hearts beating.
In the bedroom silence round us
Holding hands and hardly hearing
Sudden footstep, thud and shriek
Love that lay too deep for kissing.
"Where is Wendy? Wendy's missing."
Love so pure it had to end.
Love so strong that I was frightened
When you gripped my fingers tight.
And hugging, whispered "I'm your friend."
Goodbye Wendy. Send the fairies,
Pinewood elf and larch tree gnome.
Spingle-spangled stars are peeping
At the lush Lagonda creeping
Down the winding ways of tarmac
To the leaded lights of home.
There among the silver birches,
All the bells of all the churches
Sounded in the bath-waste running
Out into the frosty air.
Wendy speeded my undressing.
Wendy is the sheet's caressing
Wendy bending gives a blessing.
Holds me as I drift to dreamland
Safe inside my slumber wear.
In
the same passage where she mentions Auden’s “Autumn Song” (Nutshell, Ch.
16, p. 151), Elodie continues as follows: “Then what about a poem with a weak
syllable restored? ‘Wendy speeded my undressing,/Wendy is the sheet’s
caressing.’ He knew the whole of Betjeman’s ‘Indoor Games Near Newbury’ and
made us giggle.”
All of Elodie’s
expansive blather, in tribute to her dead mentor—in which she compares him to
the greatest of modern poets—is, apparently, a smokescreen. Later on we learn
that FN’s suspicions may be accurate: “she’s come to find out who killed her
lover.” This is confirmed in Ch. 18 (p. 174): “I always had my suspicions. How
eagerly they believed Elodie. Now they know: nurse’s flowers will certainly not
last.”
d
Peter Porter
An Exequy
In wet May, in the months of change,
In a country you wouldn’t visit, strange
Dreams pursue me in my sleep,
Black creatures of the upper deep –
Though you are five months dead, I see
You in guilt’s iconography,
Dear Wife, lost beast, beleaguered child,
The stranded monster with the mild
Appearance, whom small waves tease,
(Andromeda upon her knees
In orthodox deliverance)
And you alone of pure substance,
The unformed form of life, the earth
Which Piero’s brushes brought to birth
For all to greet as myth, a thing
Out of the box of imagining.
This
introduction serves to sing
Your mortal death as Bishop King
Once hymned in tetrametric rhyme
His young wife, lost before her time;
Though he lived on for many years
His poem each day fed new tears
To that unreaching spot, her grave,
His lines a baroque architrave
The Sunday poor with bottled flowers
Would by-pass in their morning hours,
Esteeming ragged natural life
(‘Most dear loved, most gentle wife’),
Yet, looking back when at the gate
And seeing grief in formal state
Upon a sculpted angel group,
Were glad that men of god could stoop
To give the dead a public stance
And freeze them in their mortal dance.
The words and
faces proper to
My misery are private – you
Would never share our heart with those
Whose only talent’s to suppose,
Nor from your final childish bed
Raise a remote confessing head –
The channels of our lives are blocked,
The hand is stopped upon the clock,
No one can say why hearts will break
And marriages are all opaque:
A map of loss, some posted cards,
The living house reduced to shards,
The abstract hell of memory,
The pointlessness of poetry –
These are the instances which tell
Of something which I know full well,
I owe a death to you – one day
The time will come for me to pay
When your slim shape from photographs
Stands at my door and gently asks
If I have any work to do
Or will I come to bed with you.
O scala enigmata,1
I’ll climb up to that attic where
The curtain of your life was drawn
Some time between despair and dawn –
I’ll never know with what halt steps
You mounted to this plain eclipse
But each stair now will station me
A black responsibility
And point me to that shut-down room,
‘This be your due appointed tomb.’
I think of us
in Italy:
Gin-and-chianti-fuelled, we
Move in a trance through Paradise,
Feeding at last our starving eyes,
Two people of the English blindness
Doing each masterpiece the kindness
Of discovering it – from Baldovinetti
To Venice’s most obscure jetty.
A true unfortunate traveller, I
Depend upon your nurse’s eye
To pick the altars where no Grinner
Puts us off our tourists’ dinner
And in hotels to bandy words
With Genevan girls and talking birds,
To wear your feet out following me
To night’s end and true amity,
And call my rational fear of flying
A paradigm of Holy Dying –
And, oh my love, I wish you were
Once more with me, at night somewhere
In narrow streets applauding wines,
The moon above the Apennines
As large as logic and the stars,
Most middle-aged of avatars,
As bright as when they shone for truth
Upon untried and avid youth.
The rooms and
days we wandered through
Shrink in my mind to one – there you
Lie quite absorbed by peace – the calm
Which life could not provide is balm
In death. Unseen by me, you look
Past bed and stairs and half-read book
Eternally upon your home,
The end of pain, the left alone.
I have no friend, no intercessor,
No psychopomp or true confessor
But only you who know my heart
In every cramped and devious part –
Then take my hand and lead me out,
The sky is overcast by doubt,
The time has come, I listen for
Your words of comfort at the door,
O guide me through the shoals of fear –
‘Fürchte dich nicht, ich bin bei dir.’2
(from The Cost
of Seriousness, 1978)
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1.
"Enigmatic scale," musical scale used by Verdi in his
"Ave Maria." It has 4 whole steps followed by 3 half steps.
2. "Be not afraid, I am with
you."
In
Ch. 16 of Nutshell (p. 153), before Elodie leaves, Trudy offers to give
her her choice of one of John’s books. She chooses a book by Porter. “’John’s
put his name in it. Peter Porter. The Cost of Seriousness. It’s got ‘An
Exequy.’ Tetrameters again. The most beautiful.”
d
John Keats
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
Much
have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And
many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round
many western islands have I been
Which
bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft
of one wide expanse had I been told
That
deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet
did I never breathe its pure serene
Till
I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then
felt I like some watcher of the skies
When
a new planet swims into his ken;
Or
like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He
star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd
at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent,
upon a peak in Darien.
In
the last chapter of Nutshell (p. 195), immediately upon being born, FN
writes: “A slithering moment of waxy, creaking emergence, and here I am, set
naked on the kingdom. Like stout Cortez (I remember a poem my father once
recited), I’m amazed.”
“Set
naked on the kingdom” is another of numerous citations from Hamlet: 4.7:
43-44.
Note: Shakesperian Citations in Nutshell (largely from "Hamlet" and "Macbeth") are discussed in my book review article on the novel.
