Our May 2012 meeting

Well, we took the train this week with some interesting fellow passengers: the poets Edward Thomas, John Betjeman and T S Eliot.  We travelled from Adlestrop to Ruislip Gardens in Middlesex, then on to Dilton Marsh Halt in Wiltshire, before finally taking the Night Mail with Skimbleshanks and arriving in Glasgow's Gallowgate station.  We learned a little about each of the poets along the way.  Betjeman was taught briefly by T S Eliot and exchanged many letters with Johnny Morris.  Thomas was one of the Dymock Poets and was involved with Eleanor Farjeon who wrote Morning Has Broken.  Eliot was nicknamed 'Old Possum' by Ezra Pound (hence Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats).  So many connections ...

And here's a challenge: read The Diary of a Nobody (1888-9) by George & Weedon Grossmith before our next meeting to discover why Betjeman referred to Lupin Pooter and Murray Posh in his poem Middlesex.

Lots to think about for our next  meeting ...

On the rails for our next meeting: Wednesday 23 May 2012

We're taking the train for our next poetry group on Wednesday 23 May 2012.  No apologies for a double dose of John Betjeman: he was the master of railway poetry after all ...

• Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas (1917)
• Middlesex, by John Betjeman (1953)
• Dilton Marsh Halt, by John Betjeman (1968) - because it's only just up the road!
• Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat, by T S Eliot (1939) - his parody of Rudyard Kipling's 1892 poem l'Envoi (also known as The Long Trail) from Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses

If we've got time we'll also look at:

• Morning Express, by Siegfried Sassoon (1915)
• The Night Mail, by W H Auden (1936)

Our meeting on 17 April 2012

Another session round the kitchen table today: this time with an eerie, woodland theme.

We started off with The Way through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling (published in 1910), with its spine-chilling sensation of hearing ghostly long skirts swishing in the dew, and that haunting last line: 'But there is no road through the woods'. Kipling, "the poet of the British Empire", was born in India, educated in England and spent his adult years in the USA, South Africa and the UK. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907.

Then we moved on to what is often described as the most famous of all American poems, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost. This was included in Frost's collection New Hampshire (1923) for which he won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. You can see Frost reading the poem at the Poetry Foundation's website: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/video/18. We discussed the scansion, and particularly the repetition of the last line (“And miles to go before I sleep”) which makes the poem so memorable.

It was time for Walter de la Mare's classic poem The Listeners, published in 1912: one of the most frequently taught poems in schools today and often near the top of the list whenever the nation votes for its favourite poem. Another poem giving us so much to talk about: including why it has the title it does, when the focus of the poem is on the Traveller, and the complex scansion. We were amused to see a few appropriate lines from the poem picked out in brick on the side of a hotel on the A3 at Guildford.

Finally - or so we thought - we read Pleasant Sounds by John Clare, and talked about his strange and complex life, which ended sadly in a Northamptonshire asylum in 1864. It would be interesting to find the original manuscript for this poem, to see whether it has been published as written - so many of the words seemed too modern.

But we still couldn't leave without just one last poem, and so we read Alfred Noyes' classic story from 1906: The Highwayman, with its wonderful repetition, the tloc tloc sound of the horse's hooves on the moonlit road, and the image of of Bess the Landlord's Daughter, desperately trying to save her highwayman lover. Described by Peter and Iona Opie as "the best narrative poem in existence for oral delivery", and well-known to all Fleetwood Mac fans, this was certainly an enthralling finish to a really enjoyable hour.