'Cure Death With the Rub of a Dock Leaf'

The Irish poet Michael Longley died on Wednesday at the age of eighty-five. I’ve read him sparsely but recall a devotion to the natural world and to World War I, in which his father fought. Here is “Glossary” (The Candlelight Master, 2020):

 

“I meet my father in the glossary

Who carried me on his shoulders, a leg

Over each, hockerty-cockerty, who

Would spend ages poking the kitchen fire,

An old soldier remembering the trenches

And telling me what he saw in the embers,

Battlefields, bomb craters, firelight visions:

A widden-dremer, yes, that’s my father.”

 

Longley adds some notes: hockerty-cockerty is to be “seated with one’s legs astride another’s shoulders”; widden-dremer is “one who sees visions in the firelight.” From the same volume is “Ors,” named for the French cemetery in which Wilfred Owen is buried. The English poet was killed a week before the Armistice while crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal:

 

I

“I am standing on the canal bank at Ors

Willing Wilfred Owen to make it across

To the other side where his parents wait.

He and his men are constructing pontoons.

The German sniper doesn’t know his poetry.

 

II

“My daughter Rebecca lives in twenty-four

Saint Bernard’s Crescent opposite the home

Wilfred visited for “perfect little dinners”

And “extraordinary fellowship in all the arts.”

I can hear him on his way to Steinthals.

 

III

“Last year I read my own poems at Craiglockhart

And eavesdropped on Robert, Siegfried, Wilfred

Whispering about poetry down the corridors.

If Wilfred can concentrate a little longer,

He might just make it to the other bank.”

 

This is “Poetry” (The Weather in Japan, 2000):

 

“When he was billeted in a ruined house in Arras

And found a hole in the wall beside his bed

And, rummaging inside, his hand rested on Keats

By Edward Thomas, did Edmund Blunden unearth

A volume which ‘the tall, Shelley-like figure’

Gathering up for the last time his latherbrush,

Razor, towel, comb, cardigan, cap comforter,

Water bottle, socks, gas mask, great coat, rifle

And bayonet, hurrying out of the same building

To join his men and march into battle, left

Behind him like a gift, the author's own copy?

When Thomas Hardy died his widow gave Blunden

As a memento of many visits to Max Gate

His treasured copy of Edward Thomas’s Poems.”

 

Longley’s wife Edna has edited two editions of Edward Thomas’ poems and one of his prose. Here is “Edward Thomas’s Poem” from Longley’s Snow Water (2004):

 

I

“I couldn’t make out the miniscule handwriting

In the notebook the size of his palm and crinkled

Like an origami quim by shell-blast that stopped

His pocket watch at death. I couldn’t read the poem.”

 

II

“From where he lay he could hear the skylark’s

Skyward exultation, a chaffinch to his left

Fidgeting among the fallen branches,

Then all the birds of the Western Front.”

 

III

“The nature poet turned into a war poet as if

He could cure death with the rub of a dock leaf.”