Free Poems That Make Grown Men Cry by Anthony and Ben Holden

pen of a manwho never knew want in his life, Winston Churchill: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’
    Easy advice to give but hard to swallow.
    Out of Work
    Alone at the shut of the day was I,
    With a star or two in a frostcleared sky,
    And the byre smell in the air.
     
    I’d tramped the length and breadth of the fen,
    But never a farmer wanted men;
    Naught doing anywhere.
     
    A great calm moon rose back of the mill,
    And I told myself it was God’s will
    Who went hungry and who went fed.
     
    I tried to whistle; I tried to be brave,
    But the new ploughed fields smelt dank as the grave;
    And I wished I were dead.
    (1924)

    In 1971, as co-editor of
Oz
magazine, Felix Dennis (b. 1947) was imprisoned by the British government at the end of the longest conspiracy trial in English history,
during which he recorded a single with John Lennon to raise money for a legal defencefund. Following his subsequent acquittal by the High Court of Appeal, Dennis went on in 1973 to found his own
magazine-publishing company, which now sees him a multimillionaire publisher and philanthropist. He turned to poetry only in his mid-fifties, but has since become a popular performance poet, with
several best-selling volumes to his name.

All the Pretty Horses
    ANONYMOUS

    CARL BERNSTEIN
    I had to really dig deep here – past Shakespeare’s sonnets, Blake, Whitman, Keats . . . the canon. And finally I got down to this lullaby that I sang to my children
from their birth.
    All the Pretty Horses
    Hush-by, Don’t you cry
    Go to sleep a little baby
    When youwake you shall find
    All the pretty little horses
     
    Blacks and bays, dapples and grays
    Coach and six a little horses
    When you wake you shall find
    All the pretty little horses
     
    Hush-by, Don’t you cry
    Go to sleep a little baby
    When you wake you shall find
    All the pretty little horses
    ( FIRST IN PRINT 1925)

    Since his celebrated partnership with Bob Woodward for the
Washington Post
on the Nixon presidency and the Watergate scandal, which resulted in
All The
President’s Men
(1974) and other books, Carl Bernstein (b. 1944) has written biographies of Pope John Paul II (
The Abuse of Power
, with Marco Politi, 1996) and Hillary Rodham
Clinton (
A Woman in Charge,
2007). He has also published a memoir of his parents,
Loyalties
(1989).

The Cool Web
    ROBERT GRAVES (1895–1985)

    JOHN SUTHERLAND
    I first came across this poem as an undergraduate. The most inefficient, but wonderfully enthusing, university teacher I’ve ever known, G. S. Fraser, was pursuing a long,
quixotic campaign to draw notice to Robert Graves as the greatest lyric poet of the century. As cultish attention to The Movement[a group of other 1950s British poets] monopolised attention, his
voice was drowned out.
    Fraser failed. But he converted me. ‘The Cool Web’ articulates the poignant sense that, whatever one gains intellectually, one loses more. The sentiment is familiar enough from those
who know their Wordsworth, and Auden put it into chillier form in ‘Their Lonely Betters’:
    As I listened froma beach-chair in the shade
    To all the noises that my garden made,
    It seemed to me only proper that words
    Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.
    It’s cleverer but – in that term of approbation we loved in the 1960s – less ‘felt.’
    Graves, it seems to me, touches a deeper chord. There is always,in his mature poetry, the still-throbbing scar tissue of a survivorof the ‘war called great’
(‘the inward scream, the duty to run mad’, as he put it). Poetry, I think, is the only thing that can make linguistics – that driest of sciences – ‘moving’.
    I read ‘The Cool Web’ in the ‘madness’ (as Graves prophesied) of late life, with a distant gesture of gratitude to G. S. Fraser and a moistening of the eye.
    The Cool Web
    Children aredumb to say how hot the day is,
    How hot the scent is of the summer rose,
    How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
    How dreadful