Ian McEwan, "NUTSHELL" Full Text of Poetry Mentioned or Cited in the Novel

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)

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.