Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (6 page)

HOWARD JACOBSON

This is not a poem of hot grief. Yes, it begins with cruel immediacy, the poet turning to share spontaneous joy with someone no longer there to share joy with, but he does not
evoke his ‘heart’s best treasure’ with agonising vividness, nor does his voice falter with sorrow commensurate
to the loss. If anything, the voice is strong and collected, and
it’s in that collectedness that the anguish lies, the scrupulousness of the remorse, the almost pedantic examination of how much memory owes to love, and how exacting the computation must
always be. ‘How could I forget thee . . . through what power even for the
least
division of an hour.’ By a more forgiving, less vigilant account
he hasn’t forgotten her at
all. Did he not, in a moment of faithful love, turn to share his joy with her? But it’s not enough to remember her as though she’s there; loyalty demands he must never forget, not for
that smallest division of time, the fact that she isn’t and never again will be. This is the terrifying, unconsoling paradox of remembrance, and it breaks the heart.

Howard Jacobson (b. 1942) won the Man Booker Prize in 2010 for
The Finkler Question
, the eleventh of his twelve novels. His latest,
Zoo Time
(2012), is an
apocalyptic comedy about the end of reading. He has also published five works of nonfiction, most recently
Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It
(2011), a collection of his columns for the
(London)
Independent
.

JOHN KEATS
(1795–1821)

KENNETH LONERGAN

Like the other two or three poems I can actually recite by heart, ‘Last Sonnet’ (or ‘Bright Star,’ as many know it today) was read to me by my friend,
the painter Patricia Broderick.

Keats knew he was dying when he wrote ‘Bright Star’, aged twenty-three, onboard a ship he was taking to Italy in
the hope that the warmer climate would save his life – which of
course it could not. The trip and his illness marked the end of his romance with Fanny Brawne.

Even as Keats stands in awe at the star’s majesty and mystery – ‘in lone splendour hung aloft the night’ – and even as he imagines what it would be like to be a
star, looking down on the beautiful Earth he is leaving, even then that’s
not what he wishes for. No, he wants the star’s perpetual span of life, so that he can be ‘Pillow’d
on my fair love’s ripening breast / To feel forever its soft fall and swell / Awake for ever in a sweet unrest . . .’

Long before my friend Patsy herself died, the content and context of this poem invariably reduced me to a useless puddle of tears. And it still does, not because it reminds
me of her, but
because of the miracle that enables another human being to carry me back in time and over the ocean with nothing more than a sequence of words, onto the deck
of a ship where I
am really and truly looking at the stars with someone else’s eyes, intimately connected with his thoughts, understanding in my heart something of his feelings.

The playwright, screenwriter, and director
Kenneth Lonergan (b. 1962) wrote and directed the films
You Can Count On Me
(2000) and
Margaret
(2011). His stage
credits include
This Is Our Youth
(1996),
The Waverley Gallery
(2000),
Lobby Hero
(2001),
The Starry Messenger
(2009), and
Medieval Play
(2012). Among
Lonergan’s other screenplays are
Analyse This
(1999) and Martin Scorsese’s
Gangs of New York
(2002), which was cowritten with Jay
Cocks and Steven Zaillian.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
(1792–1822)

DAVID EDGAR

News of the Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819 – during which British cavalry killed fifteen and injured up to seven hundred men and women at a Manchester rally for
parliamentary reform – reached Shelley in Italy three weeks later. The resultant ninety-one-stanza poem
was not to be published for thirteen years.

The title refers not to the anarchy of protest but to the brutality of the politicians who put it down (‘I met Murder on the way – / He had a mask like Castlereagh’). The
parade of Murder and his allies (Anarchy itself mounted ‘like Death in the Apocalypse’) is met by a ‘maniac maid’ whose name is Hope but ‘looked more like
Despair.’ The second
half of the poem consists of her speech, imagining the gathering of a ‘great assembly’ whose nonviolent resistance to armed tyranny anticipates Thoreau and
Gandhi.

No one who has ever been at, or been inspired by, a great demonstration can fail to be moved by Hope’s final call for the people to rise ‘in unvanquishable number’. The last
line is even more devastating. Shelley has established
a variation in his four-line stanza pattern,
adding an occasional, unexpected, third-rhyming fifth line. Earlier, the
device emphasises brutality and starvation. At the end, it celebrates something very different.

More than sixty plays by David Edgar (b. 1948) have been performed around the world on stage, radio,
and TV. They include
Destiny
(1976),
Maydays
(1983),
The
Shape of the Table
(1990),
Albert Speer
(2000),
The Continental Divide
(2003),
Playing with Fire
(2005),
Written on the Heart
(2011), and
If Only
(2013), as
well as an adaptation of Dickens,
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
(1980). Formerly Professor of Playwriting at the University of Birmingham, he has also written several
books
about theatre, including
The Second Time as Farce
(1988) and
How Plays Work
(2009).

JOHN CLARE
(1793–1864)

KEN LOACH

So many poems can touch you. Which one to choose? A war poem? Who could read Wilfred Owen’s words and remain unmoved? In ‘Disabled’, he describes a soldier,
both legs gone, waiting in his wheelchair to be put to bed.

Then there are poems of mourning and loss. Goethe’s ‘The Erl-King’, where a child is taken
from the arms of his father as he rides through the night, captures the acute,
shocking pain of sudden bereavement. In another vein, there are Christina Rossetti’s poems of lost love: ‘Remember me when I am gone away . . .’