How do You Make Grown Men Weep?

There’s been a lot of publicity for an anthology called ‘Poems that Make Grown Men Cry :  100 men on the words that move them’ . Leafing through it in a bookshop the other day, I was puzzled by most of the choices. In one or two cases, I could see exactly how the displayed verses might trigger tears. But in many,  I got the impression that there was a bit of showing off going on, with people trying to proclaim how well-read they were.

 

I find that the power of verse to make me weep (and like all instinctively cruel men I weep easily) varies with time and conditions. Also it changes with age. There was a time, in my twenties and thirties, when Keats could set me off very easily.  The final line of his ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

 

    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

 

 

 

Still seems to me as perfectly true and profound as it was when I first read it. But the poem itself, with its choking evocation of a lost and lovely moment, buried beneath thousands of years of irrecoverable time, no longer brings me to tears as it once did. Nor does the equally potent evocation of autumnal England in his 'Ode to Autumn' trouble my tear-glands any more.

 

I think that’s because Keats is really for adolescents and those not much older.Kingsley Amis once said that many of us would pass through a stage where we thought his poetry was the most beautiful we had ever read or heard, but also suggested that most of us would grow out of it. I was annoyed when I first read this, but now I see what he meant.

 

 I am still completely thrilled, and made unaccountably sad, by the great pealing last lines of Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’, to which I was introduced at the age of ten by a brilliant teacher, and some parts of this (though alas not the whole poem) are written indelibly on my heart.

 

These words invariably produce a picture (always the same) in my head. It is a very melancholy picture, and as I grow older it is ever more obviously about death, but it has lost any power to make me cry.

 

‘Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’

 

I was quite shocked recently to revisit Housman’s lines on the Cherry Tree in a ’A Shropshire Lad’, and remember committing them to memory aged about eight, never guessing that one day I would laugh to read the lines ‘of my threescore years and ten, twenty will not come again’.

 

As for Gray’s Elegy, (from which thousands of us quote each day without even knowing that we do)  I first met it when I was ( as some children are) very worried at the thought that my parents would one day die, and so found distressing the lines

 ‘For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,

         Or busy housewife ply her evening care:

No children run to lisp their sire's return,

         Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.’

 

Now the whole thing , apart from its general warning against worldly ambition, seems to me like an enchanted wander through a small surviving piece of 18th-century England, that lost paradise of tranquillity . It feels even more so if you visit Stoke Poges, the Buckinghamshire village where it was famously written, besieged as it is now by traffic and urban sprawl.

 

But no tears. I don’t even get a  twinge any more from Wordsworth’s ‘Solitary Reaper’

 

'Will no one tell me what she sings?—

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow

For old, unhappy, far-off things,

And battles long ago’

Those verses which do trouble me inexplicably tend to be more recently appreciated. I still have no idea why Robert Frost's ‘But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep’ are so unsettlingly moving. But I know that they are.  I’ve discussed small parts of Belloc’s ‘Dedicatory Ode’ and Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ in a short eulogy I wrote for my late brother, so I won't repeat that here. Two war poems continue to have a great power to distress me. There are Housman’s brief lines ‘Here dead we lie because we did not choose to live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life to be sure, is nothing much to lose, but young men think it is, and we were young’, which is a very bitter cup.  And then there's Edward Thomas’s ‘In Memoriam Easter 1915' :

‘The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood, this Eastertide, call into mind the men, now far from home, who with their sweethearts should have gathered them, and will do never again’.

 

The evocative power concentrated into these brief words, and exploding in the imagination,  is astonishing.

 

Cecil Day-Lewis’s ‘Walking Away’ (dedicated to his son Sean) has a double meaning to me, as I have been both child and parent at boarding-school partings, and I would not expect anyone who hadn’t gone through this odd English experience to know what it meant, but anyway :

‘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 away

 

Behind 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.’

 

But increasingly I find the deepest power in the Psalms, as translated by Miles Coverdale (these versions are slightly different from those in the Authorised Version of the Bible, and almost always better. They're in the back of the Prayer Book). They are packed with flashes of gold, some brief,  some quite sustained. I think C.S.Lewis is right to say that the 19th is the greatest of all, and I have been lucky enough to have heard it sung twice in the last week, once by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge and once by the choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, in each case so beautifully that it made me tremble to listen to it.

 

But if you have tears to shed, the 128th, which is supposed to be read at weddings but these days seldom is, seems to me to be the most dangerous (especially if you have also just read the 126th and 127th in which the English language reaches some of its very highest moments).  But I expect plenty of readers' eyes will pass over it without any response at all, such is the mystery of poetry and its effect upon us, and our essential loneliness in all things . Here is the 128th in full:

 

‘Blessed are all they that fear the Lord and walk in his ways. For thou shalt eat the labours of thine hands; O well is thee and happy shalt thou be.

Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine: upon the walls of thine house. Thy children like the olive branches: round about thy table.

Lo, thus shall the man be blessed that feareth the Lord. The Lord from out of Sion shall so bless thee: that thou shalt see Jerusalem in prosperity all thy life long.

 

Yea, that thou shalt see thy children’s children: and peace upon Israel.’