Free Six Poets by Alan Bennett Page A

dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
   at the back of my mind to guide me.
    I am not yet born; forgive me
    For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
   my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
      my life when they murder by means of my
         hands, my death when they live me.
    I am not yet born; rehearse me
    In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
   frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
      waves call me to folly and the desert calls
         me to doom and the beggar refuses
            my gift and my children curse me.
    I am not yet born; O hear me,
    Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.
    I am not yet born; O fill me
    With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
   would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
      one face, a thing, and against all those
         who would dissipate my entirety, would
            blow me like thistledown hither and
               thither or hither and thither
                     like water held in the
                        hands would spill me.
    Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
    Otherwise kill me.

    The public like labels (or newspapers think they do), and particularly when it comes to art and literature, which are both potentially dangerous or at least awkward to handle. ‘The Poets of the Thirties’, which is itself a label, generally comes in a nice boxed set labelled ‘Auden and Co.’ – that is, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice.
    This must have been more irritating for Spender, Day Lewis and Co. than it was for Auden, though it’s true they all knew one another, had been at the same schools or known one another at university, and sometimes collaborated. But then came the war and they went their different ways, some of them not seeming to survive the loss of their corporate identity, just as actors who have been a big hit when with the National Theatre or the Royal Shakespeare Company then go off on their own and are lost sight of. One should never underestimate the importance of one’s
setting
. When Louis MacNeice died in 1963, an obituary (admittedly in a Chicago newspaper) identified him as ‘a writer with the BBC’ and concluded: ‘He was formerly a poet.’

Carrickfergus
    I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
    To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:
    Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
    Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams
    The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
    The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
    The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
    But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.
    The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
    The yarn-mill called its funeral cry at noon;
    Our lights looked over the lough to the lights of Bangor
    Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.
    The Norman walled this town against the country
    To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave
    And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting
    The list of Christ on the cross in the angle of the nave.
    I was the rector’s son, born to the anglican order,
    Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
    The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
    With ruffs