British poet Carol Rumens, whose Guardian poem of the week column ran for nearly 20 years and was beloved among its loyal readership, has died aged 81.

Her family said that she died peacefully on 25 April, after being diagnosed with a brain tumour.

Rumens’ poems, often profoundly political, were published across more than a dozen collections, including Animal People, De Chirico’s Threads and Blind Spots. She also wrote plays, fiction, criticism and published poetry in translation.

She began writing the Guardian poem of the week column in October 2007. Over two decades, she developed an engaged readership, responding to each column in the comments section.

Rumens was born on 10 December 1944 in Forest Hill, south London. She began a philosophy degree, but left before finishing it and later received a postgraduate diploma in writing for stage from City College Manchester.

Her first collection, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours, was published in 1973. In the mid-70s, she worked as an editor on Croydon-based magazine Pick, before becoming poetry editor at Quarto and Literary Review in the early 80s.

Through the 80s, she published several collections, including Star Whisper, The Greening of the Snow Beach and her first volume of selected poems. She also collaborated on the first of several translated volumes of poetry from Russian, by poets including Evgeny Rein and Irina Ratushinskaya. Poetry in translation “revitalises our daily, cliche-haunted vocabulary”, Rumens wrote in 2007. “It extends us in the way real travelling does, giving us new sounds, sights and smells.”

Rumens taught at a number of universities, including the University of Hull, where she established an MA in creative writing, and the University of Bangor, where she was a longtime visiting professor.

The poet was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984. She was shortlisted for the Forward poetry prize for best single poem twice, and the same year, she won a Society of Authors Cholmondeley award.

Her first Guardian poem of the week choice in was Far Rockaway by the Welsh-language poet Iwan Llwyd, translated by Robert Minhinnick. Over the following two decades, she would write nearly 1,000 columns, featuring poems by household names in between those of lesser-known writers.

For her final column, published in February, she chose two poems by Matthew Rice. In the comments section, one reader thanked her for her “usual great choice of poems and erudite introduction”.

In 2019, a collection of 52 poem of the week columns and their accompanying commentaries were published in a book titled Smart Devices.

“I’m still surprised to find myself writing a weekly blog at all,” Rumens wrote in 2019. She described feeling “electrified” by the research process behind the columns. “To lift off from the launching pad of a poem, and bounce and float through the galaxies of Search, learning bits and pieces which ought to be unrelated but which mesh because I am their narrator, is as exciting as the process of writing a poem – and, in fact, remarkably similar to it.”

Taking on the column, “I think I wanted to learn how to think about poems, as well as find out what I thought of them,” she continued. “That’s the selfish, self-loving bit. The more altruistic motive is that I feel poets owe each other (or each other’s poems) a duty of care. One person can’t do very much but they can do something, make a few sounds to erase the stupid silence which hangs around poems and collections of poems.

“I’m sick of hearing that too much poetry is written and published. No, too little poetry is taught and read. A poem isn’t usually a butterfly or a mobile phone. It deserves a longer life. I wish I wrote better about poems and poetry, but I know I should go on writing, any way, as best I can.”

A lost copy of a poem composed in the seventh century by a Northumbrian cattle herder – the earliest surviving poem in the English language – has been discovered in Rome.

Scholars from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) uncovered the manuscript that contains Caedmon’s Hymn at the National Central Library of Rome.

Bede, the medieval theologian revered as the father of English history, recorded the nine-line poem in the eighth century. The Old English version discovered in Rome is believed to have been transcribed by a monk in northern Italy between AD800 and AD830.

“When we saw it we looked at each other and I said, ‘No one knows about this’,” said Elisabetta Magnanti, who discovered the manuscript with Mark Faulkner, from Trinity’s school of English. “To make sure I wasn’t dreaming I double-checked the catalogues and there was no mention of it. It was a huge surprise, a very good one.”

It is the third oldest surviving text of the poem, after older copies held at Cambridge and St Petersburg. Those other versions have the poem in Latin, with the Old English text added in the margin or at the end.

The Rome copy is significant because it contains the Old English version in the main body of the text, reflecting the language’s growing status in the ninth century, said Faulkner. “The absence of the poem would have been felt by the readers, I think, and so that’s why it goes in.”

The poem is punctuated with a full stop after every word, which shows that word spacing was a relatively new invention, said Faulkner. “It is part of the early development of ways of dividing words and shows text starting to come towards the presentation of English that we know today.”

The researchers have detailed their findings in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours, an open-access journal published by Cambridge University Press.

Caedmon is said to have been an illiterate cattle herder who worked at Whitby Abbey in North Yorkshire. According to Bede, he had a divine visitation that inspired him to compose and sing Hymn, which lauds God for creating the world.

Bede included a Latin translation in his landmark work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, but omitted the original Old English version. However, within a century a monk at the abbey of Nonantola, in northern Italy, included the Old English version, said Faulkner. “It is a sign of how much early readers valued English poetry.”

There are at least 160 surviving copies of Bede’s history. Conflicting evidence about a copy in Rome prompted Magnanti, an expert in medieval manuscripts, to ask the National Central Library in Rome to check its archives. The institution located, digitised and emailed pages that included the poem. “This discovery is a testament to the power of libraries to facilitate new research by digitising their collections and making them freely available online,” she said.

Andrea Cappa, head of manuscripts and rare books at the Rome library, said the institution was digitising holdings from Italy’s National Centre for the Study of the Manuscript, which will give researchers access to more than 40m images.

Riccardo Fangarezzi, head of archives at the abbey in Nonantola, said he looked forward to further discoveries. “The present times may be rather dark, yet such intellectual contributions are genuine rays of sunlight: the continent is less isolated,” he said.

The poet Paul Muldoon translated Caedmon’s Hymn into contemporary English in a 2016 anthology of British poetry. The opening lines read:

“Now we must praise to the skies, the Keeper of the heavenly kingdom,
The might of the Measurer, all he has in mind,
The work of the Father of Glory, of all manner of marvel.”

In Yann Martel’s fifth novel, a Canadian classicist, Harlow Donne, has been offered a year’s fellowship at Oxford University. His wife, Gail, has a full-time managerial job, and they have a seven-year-old daughter, Helen. Who will pour out her breakfast cereal and pick her up from school while Harlow is away? He and Gail quarrel. He leaves for England, and as she sees him off Gail whispers in his ear: “Don’t come back.”

So far, so everyday: but once Harlow gets to Oxford, the narrative shifts its form and becomes odder and more interesting. His prescribed task is to help sift through and translate a hoard of ancient papyri from Oxyrhynchus, in upper Egypt. It’s tedious work. Soon, though, Harlow is piecing together from words or half-words on wisps of desiccated reeds what he believes to be a long-lost epic poem. It relates the story of the Trojan war, but not, as Homer tells it, from the viewpoint of princely warriors and gods. The protagonist is a common soldier, a “son of nobody” named Psoas.

This is not just a novel about a poem: it actually contains that poem. The Psoad makes up half of Martel’s book in terms of word count, and most of it in terms of creative energy. The poem’s fragments are printed across the top half of the pages, while below the line are footnotes, in which Harlow sets out to comment on the text, but is soon finding in it prompts for reminiscences about his relationship with Gail, and reflections about his home life addressed to his daughter. The two narrative strands – the ancient epic and the modern domestic drama – tug at and distort each other, until finally they merge in a doubly mournful conclusion.

It’s not a brand new form – think of Nabokov’s Pale Fire – but Martel handles it ingeniously. As in Pale Fire, we readers become suspicious of the scholar’s motivation: is Harlow actually fabricating this supposedly ancient text as a vehicle for his own resentments, his own love, guilt and grief? Certainly his supervisor thinks so; he compares the Psoad to Frankenstein’s monster, “a corpse with a thousand stitches”. But Harlow (or rather his creator) has the skill to carry readers along.

The Psoad, 30 fragments of which are presented here, is a compelling narrative poem. Written largely in iambic pentameter, it is varied and enlivened by salty dialogue and songs. It has vivid detail, jokes and puns, plot twists and sardonic commentary. Martel shifts the focus of the story away from the heroes; his Greeks include merchants, more knowledgable and more cosmopolitan than Homeric warriors. But those warriors are also given space. In recent years the poet Alice Oswald has wonderfully reanimated Homer, turning his catalogues of killings into a grave lamentation for the lost lives of so many young men, while novelists such as Pat Barker and Natalie Haynes have looked past the hypermasculine militarist legend to the plight of the women of Troy.

Martel does something different and interestingly problematic – he acknowledges the dreadful glamour of the masters of war and the thirst for blood without which conflict would be unimaginable. (Harlow remembers his grandfather, who fought in Vietnam, waking from a senile doze to tell him: “We are hiding places for monsters.”) He also, in shifting attention from the supermen to the wretched other ranks, unmasks the sordid misery of battle. The armour that rubs and chafes. The soldier, before a battle, vomiting with fear. The lice and fleas. The teeth spat out “like olive pips” after a blow to the head. The men sobbing in their tents, missing home, missing wives, missing children.

There are exotic animals in this Troy, and animals, as readers of Martel’s Booker-winning Life of Pi know, are numinous beings in his fiction. In place of gods, he gives us giraffes and porcupines and elephants, the last being crucial to a bold variation on the familiar story. Why construct a wooden horse to get inside the city walls, when you have gigantic tusked creatures capable of tearing down the Scaean gate? These beasts introduce a picturesquely sacred dimension to the Psoad, but there is another less successful strand to the work, important both to the fictional Harlow Donne and the real Yann Martel, who has spoken publicly about the centrality of religious faith to his concept of a full life. Harlow suggests that the warrior heroes of the ancient epic “created the space” for the advent of Christianity, “the other half of the profoundly contradictory western character”. The idea is pushed insistently in Harlow’s notes, but Martel fails to make a persuasive case for it, leaving it insecurely tacked on to the exuberantly reimagined pagan material.

Nor does he quite make good his apparent intention to balance the devastation of war against Harlow’s private heartbreak. Harlow explains to little Helen that the Iliad is about angry men who shout and fight. “So it’s like you and Mommy?” asks the child. But no, it really isn’t. Nor is the nervousness of a man about to ask a woman out on a date an adequate equivalent for the terror of a soldier waiting for the command to advance. Son of Nobody is a fine novel, but with an unbalanced structure. Harlow’s voice, in the footnotes, is pernickety and self-pitying – easily eclipsed by Martel’s impressive pastiche of epic mode. Whatever the outcome of the domestic strand, it can’t match up to the blazing horror of the epic story’s ending, with “a rain of children” tossed off the walls of Troy.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s most recent book is The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham (4th Estate).

Over its two centuries, acclaimed writers and artists have found inspiration at London zoo, from Edwin Landseer’s Trafalgar Square lions, to AA Milne’s naming “Winnie” after resident bear Winnipeg, and Sylvia Plath’s poem Zoo Keeper’s Wife.

Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, who would become poet laureate, worked at the zoo briefly as a dish washer, an experience said to have helped fuel his inspiration for The Thought-Fox.

As the ZSL (Zoological Society of London) celebrates its 200th anniversary, the current poet laureate, Simon Armitage, now joins their ranks with his latest work, The Moon and the Zoo, published to mark this milestone in the international conservation charity’s history.

Armitage narrates the poem, which conjures up the night-time world at the zoo, in a specially commissioned animation illustrated by Greg King, which carries the words through a dreamlike journey from the zoo out into the wider natural world.

The poem opens as the world sleeps, and the moon “slides in under the turnstile after dark, moves in a silent arc at an ancient pace, dabs its ointment on the gibbon’s paw, nitpicks its way through the troop of gorillas, smooths the silverback’s fur.”

It culminates with dawn break, as Armitage reflects on shared responsibility of the natural world, and “the moon hands over the keys of the world and trusts them to us.”

During time spent with animals and staff at London zoo, Armitage said he “met Katie, a Mexican red-kneed spider”, watched Sumatran tigers, and went behind the scenes in the reptile house. He was intrigued by the secret lives of animals, “the mysterious aspects of their existence which we never really get to see … their thoughts and dreams, which we can only imagine and guess at.”

He said: “The night is a metaphor for the unknown, and the moon is an eternal watch and witness over those lives, and has been for millions of years. Some animals are very active in the darkness, but for others it must provide a respite and a refuge from the global human activity that can be so disruptive to their needs.”

The moon was also a metaphor for the work of ZSL, he said, representing the “keeping and caring”, and the “important research” away from public view.

The poem also aims to share ZSL’s message about the “wonder of the natural world” and “how the richness of nature can enrich our own thinking and extend our imaginations”, he said.

“Daylight brings the human world out of its bed and its sleep, the world of the sun is a world owned and run by humans – the last line of the poem is about our obligation to nature, and the trust needed for humanity and nature to find a harmonious relationship. Oh, and I wanted the poem to be fun as well – playful in its imagery and ideas.”

ZSL was founded in 1826 to advance zoological science, and opened the world’s first scientific zoo, London zoo, in 1828, for zoologists including Charles Darwin. It opened to the public in 1847.

Kathryn England, the CEO of ZSL, said: “For 200 years, ZSL has worked to bring people closer to wildlife and inspire action to protect it. Simon’s poem captures both the wonder of those encounters and the responsibility that comes with them. With our anniversary just days away, it’s a powerful reminder of the role people can play in the future of wildlife.”

The Moon and The Zoo

It slides in under the turnstile after dark,

moves in a silent arc at an ancient pace,

dabs its ointment on the gibbon’s paw,

nitpicks its way through the troop of gorillas,

smooths the silverback’s fur.

The moon

puts a crystalline glint in the tiger’s eye,

makes a zebra flicker like old film,

shushes the two-toed sloth when it stirs.

On it goes, incognito keeper and carer

wheeling through tunnels, passing through fences,

casting the black kite in a platinum glow,

mending cracked hide with its soft flux

and welding the armadillo’s chainmail coat.

A restless otter slips out of its holt

and rolls the ball of the moon in its feet;

the full moon smears its milky smile

on the lips of pups and kittens and cubs.

It crowns the giraffe in its standing sleep,

draws out the aye aye’s ET fingers

for a midnight manicure, blesses a tortoise,

lifts up its lamp to check on the lions,

sharpens the warthog’s tusks, brushes the strings

of the cupboard spider’s jittery web

without sounding a note, then makes

a final sweep of the nests and dens.

But there’s still work to do before dawn,

spreading out through the city, leafleting streets,

leaving animal dreams under pillows

and conjuring tundra, rain forest, swamp

or savannah from gardens and parks,

lighting up waking minds with wild thoughts.

Then morning breaks; the moon hands over

the keys of the world and trusts them to us.

©Simon Armitage

A poem about language, love, and processing distressing world events has won this year’s £5,000 National Poetry Competition. The Gathering by Partridge Boswell was picked from more than 21,000 entries by poets in 113 countries.

The poem came from Boswell’s attempt to make sense of global suffering, state violence and war. He describes how he “followed the media for a long while, writing elegies, parodies and rants” to make sense of his “discomfort and disbelief”, and the emotional burden this entails.

“We were blown away by this poem, and we couldn’t resist returning to it again and again, each reading yielding more insights into its ambition, the emotional stakes and philosophical perspicacity of its ideas,” the judges said of The Gathering.

“The speaker reflects on the tensions of personal grief against the backdrop of state violence in Gaza and elsewhere,” they added. “How do we maintain language’s potency amid the anaesthetising relentlessness of the news cycle? How do we resist false narratives, eclipsed histories?”

Boswell is the author of the Fool for Poetry prize-winning chapbook Levis Corner House and the Grolier prize-winning collection Some Far Country. He is also the co-founder of the Bookstock literary festival in Vermont.

“For this poem to receive such recognition is a humbling and massively ‘affirming flame’ in a dark winter,” Boswell said. He wins £5,000 for his first prize poem. Nine other winners were also named, including runner-up Damen O’Brien for his poem Axe (winning £3,000) and third prize winner Zoe Dorado for Badminton (winning £2,000). The top three poems will be published in the spring 2026 issue of the Poetry Society’s journal, The Poetry Review.

Seven commended poets, each winning £500, were Jim McElroy, Kate Wakeling, Alex Mankowitz, Mark Fiddes, Jane Ord, Jade Angeles Fitton and Lindsey Forster-Holland. All the poems were read anonymously by a judging panel comprising Susannah Dickey, Ian Duhig and Denise Saul.

The competition was founded in 1978, and past winners include Carol Ann Duffy, Sinéad Morrissey, James Berry and Tony Harrison. Last year, Fiona Larkin won the award for Absence Has a Grammar, inspired by her experience missing her son after he moved from the UK to Australia.

The next competition will open in June.

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The Gathering

Above my meditating head, a record herd of god’s tiny cows
grazes on the blank page of ceiling. How they slipped in via
crevices, god only knows. Yet another testament to a seamed
world where cracks widen and swallow our hungers whole.

A thousand or so volunteering for the next lower case i,
period, ellipsis or umlaut… interrogating the bare expanse
upside-down, a pair here and there posing as colons—
brave pacifists of summer’s coda, ensuring exclamation

and question won’t end in pointless machete and scythe.
Losing count of gaunt warmer days, all placidly repair
to a colorless gulag of ceiling pristine as the sky after 9/11
or Gandhi’s mind, banished of muddy boots. Foraging air,

do they miss their dirt and grass? Diapaused in stark sterile
contrast to the fermenting carnival of sweet decay coloring
autumn’s kaleidoscope a glass pane away… did they cross
the border with families and dreams intact ahead of a killing

frost? How we continue to innocently decimate each other
and blame gravity, god knows. God who drifts now nowhere
and everywhere again, sleeping in the churches of our cars,
insisting every story still ends in love and ones that don’t

are so starved they’ve lost their appetite for what feeds a soul
on its famished flight from an Gorta mór to the salted shore
of Gaza. The honey water you set on a sill last year, they
drowned in. No, seasons can’t be sweetened with intention

yet in a week when summer’s still putting up high numbers
and two friends leave by their own design, it seems an illicit ill-
timed conceit to reckon a wish to euthanize with a will to survive—
while conducting a threnody for yet another ending / impending

genocide of life, truth, hope or love plying the complicit silence
of a bedroom where sleep’s erasure can’t hide the heinous crime
of negligence or revise a rehashed history that passes as news.
Their bright robes shine incarnadine, a congregation reciting

in unison psalms and proverbs of limbo. You whistle a living
wake as tacit prayer gestates to hunger-strike. Exploring safe,
prosaic pages of snow, they procrastinate then power down.
Black iotas cluster in corners, gathering a geometry to trace

the contour of your starving heart—the ravenous reticence
that remains of language when language fails and meaning’s
odometer is broken, when punctuation alone hovers aloft—
stars we can finally reach, once love’s last light is spoken.

01.29

When we look up at stars on break
we see only stars behind
the exhaled Milky Way
of Bobby’s Golden Virginia,
ways to navigate shift patterns,
nothing seismic or anything approaching
truth; for us stars mean only night shift,
insanity of depth,
the slow individual seconds
during which the dotted starlight
doesn’t burn fast enough.

05.29

It was wee Gail’s seventieth birthday
last week and she has a special
seat to sit on all shift

and her hands are old at the task,
old at working the tricks that come
with having laboured

in the same place for so long

and she’s making light work
of sifting defective ring washers
from those within tolerance and

her bench could be a grand piano,
her patch of floor a stage,
and, in another life, it is.

In plastic, a book-length poem cycle by the Northern Irish poet Matthew Rice, the time-stamp titles ensure that clock-watching is an experience readers share with the narrator and his fellow workers through their 12-hour factory night shift. Whether Rice is observing the enforced machine-order of the production line, evaluating his own thoughts about cinema, music and literature, or empathising with the other workers, each individual short poem is a cherished fragment of perception seeking a moment of freedom from the tyranny of its time-stamp. The two pieces I’ve chosen are exactly four hours and more than 20 poems apart; distinct in tone and structure, each registers awareness that the potential of the individuals concerned, as a collective or singly, is frustrated by their socio-economic position.

The workers in 01.29 are on a break, but their star-gazing is presented from the limited and immediate perspective in which the nearest stars are tobacco-sparks, “the exhaled Milky Way / of Bobby’s Golden Virginia”. The Milky Way leads only to earthbound “ways to navigate shift patterns”. Imaginative or intellectual speculation is forbidden by the laws of factory routine that the workers have had to internalise.

Fully aware of that limitation, the speaker keeps possibility tamped down, while simultaneously acknowledging its power. The phrase “insanity of depth” inscribes the dizziness a free-spirited mental navigation of the cosmos might risk. The speaker and his colleagues are necessary conspirators against visions, star-gazers from the depth of despairing realism. While the poem insists on “nothing seismic or anything approaching / truth”, it acknowledges that the denial falls far short of human “depth”. Stars, increasingly distant, mark time like the numerals on the digital clock but infinitely slower: whereas the sparks released from “Bobby’s Golden Virginia” are all too ephemeral, “the dotted starlight/ doesn’t burn fast enough” for the night-shift workers.

In the second poem, the speaker focuses on a single worker, “wee Gail”, and, by the second line, although her 70th birthday was “last week”, the present-continuous tense is seemingly established: “she has a special / seat to sit on all shift”. Her seat may be connected to the friendly recognition of her birthday, but, more likely, she habitually occupies a particular bench-space for ergonomic reasons, in line with company regulations. The image of the seat is rightly left for the reader to form – and then to transform.

Centrally placed, a single line of monosyllables illustrates the one-dimensionality of Gail’s service “in the same place for so long”, but the resumed triplets have her “making light work” of it all as she skilfully performs her task, “sifting defective ring washers / from those within tolerance”. The poet-speaker, too, makes light work of the romantic, celebratory turn after “and” at the end of the third triplet, when the ensuing pause instigates the vision of deft-fingered Gail as, perhaps, a concert pianist. This wouldn’t be impossible “in another life”. Even here, Rice is almost curbed by realism. Somehow, he succeeds in lifting that heavy shadow cast by “another life”, dissolving it in the glow of what feels like genuine admiration and genuine affirmation.

In an endnote, Rice pays tribute to an 1830 book by the French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, Proletarian Nights: The Worker’s Dream in 19th-Century France. In Rancière’s vision of socialism, labourers desire, and have the potential for, freedom from their work. Rice addresses the mental and physical costs of the labour treadmill, and, as a poet and son of a poet, he is haunted by the concept of repressed creative potential in others. The poem about “wee Gail” is a particularly direct and moving expression of that vision.

The fulfillment of Rancière’s ideal looms close to us in the age of AI, with the decline of human labour at even the white-collar level, and in production lines’ replacement-staffing by robots. Freedom for self-fulfillment will be available, in theory, but how will it be inscribed and allocated by our institutions? The many questions will be tough to solve. In the meantime, the poems in plastic both honour and transcend their traditional factory setting, and remind us of how much there could be to gain in the dawning digital era.

To Wordsworth

Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know
That things depart which never may return:
Childhood and youth, friendship and love’s first glow,
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn.
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine
Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.
Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine
On some frail bark in winter’s midnight roar:
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood
Above the blind and battling multitude:
In honoured poverty thy voice did weave
Songs consecrate to truth and liberty, —
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve,
Thus having been, that thou should cease to be.

Shelley’s genre in To Wordsworth has been described as the “corrective tribute”. The euphemism seems to let Shelley off lightly. There’s little doubt that the younger poet intended a combination more abrasive than gently “improving”. The sonnet was published in his 1816 collection, Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude, in which one of the themes is an idealistic young Romantic poet’s narrative of political disillusion.

Shelley’s technique is artful. The opening address to Wordsworth has a tone of gentle lament, in which the younger poet sees himself and his addressee as sharers of life’s ordinary sorrows and losses, the “common woes”. His quiet affirmation of solidarity is, however, a preparation for stronger censure to follow, and soon we see the place where the weapon is unsheathed: “These common woes I feel. One loss is mine, / Which thou too feel’st, yet I alone deplore.” The stop after “I feel” marks the severance. Shelley sees the lost intensity of their once-shared political idealism. All his disillusionment with Wordsworth centres in the verb “deplore”. It describes Shelley’s strength of young feeling, unique and merciless.

The particularly cruel insight (if true) is that Wordsworth’s resigns his power with less suffering than Shelley experiences, observing his resignation. The loss is far more sharply registered by Wordsworth’s once-admiring younger friend – according to his friend’s account. It may be his true response, and a cruel judgment: it isn’t exactly a usable “corrective”.

The “frail bark” and “rock-like refuge” Wordsworth has presented in young Shelley’s view are somewhat conventional metaphors, and seem rather shallowly connected to the work and the life. However, Shelley raises his game. He finds a special decorum in a last longing image of Wordsworth in all his moral presence: “In honoured poverty thy voice did weave / Songs consecrate to truth and liberty.” Shelley would have been thinking of the more politically radical sonnets by Wordsworth such as To Toussaint Louverture and possibly the despairing The World Is Too Much With Us. Wordsworth’s nature poems were also important to Shelley, and furthered the democratic vision.

What the younger visionary proclaims ultimately is the imaginative and moral death of the older poet. It’s a chilling verdict, and the truth of it is not proven: we learn much more of what Shelley felt about Wordsworth than any details concerning the finer points of the failure and complacency he believed Wordsworth to have exemplified. Wordsworth was still some years from the pinnacle of success, respectability and poet laureateship, and the various charges of loss of inspiration other poets would later press. To Wordsworth remains effective in the slowly mustered forces of its sincerity and regret, and the emotional charge of the disappointment. “Deserting” his own songs (like a leader abandoning his troops) Wordsworth has left Shelley to grieve, “Thus having been, that thou should cease to be.” Shelley has in fact come to bury a poet he believes is already creatively, politically, dead on the battlefield of ideas.

The Secret Day

My yesterday has gone, has gone and left me tired,
And now tomorrow comes and beats upon the door;
So I have built To-day, the day that I desired,
Lest joy come not again, lest peace return no more,
Lest comfort come no more.

So I have built To-day, a proud and perfect day,
And I have built the towers of cliffs upon the sands;
The foxgloves and the gorse I planted on my way;
The thyme, the velvet thyme, grew up beneath my hands,
Grew pink beneath my hands.

So I have built To-day, more precious than a dream;
And I have painted peace upon the sky above;
And I have made immense and misty seas that seem
More kind to me than life, more fair to me than love —
More beautiful than love.

And I have built a house — a house upon the brink
Of high and twisted cliffs; the sea’s low singing fills it;
And there my Secret Friend abides, and there I think
I’ll hide my heart away before tomorrow kills it
A cold tomorrow kills it.

Yes, I have built To-day, a wall against To-morrow,
So let To-morrow knock — I shall not be afraid,
For none shall give me death, and none shall give me sorrow,
And none shall spoil this darling day that I have made.
No storm shall stir my sea. No night but mine shall shade
This day that I have made.

This poem by the novelist, journalist and suffragist Stella Benson appears in her collection, Twenty, published in June 1918, shortly before the end of the first world war. (Some of her own reactions to the first world war are recorded here.) Benson (1892-1933) went to California that same year, largely because she was in poor health and her doctor had recommended the climate.

I imagine that most of Twenty had been put together before she embarked on her travels. The Secret Day may have emerged from her fears concerning the journey and her future in a strange country. Interestingly, it illustrates the psychological need to find a sanctuary in time rather than space. Benson is aware that the device is an artificial one, but launches a convincing appeal for its necessity, beautifully structured by the constant echoes of anaphora. She has “built To-day” (a day she was hoping to greet in another form) “Lest joy come not again, lest peace return no more, / Lest comfort come no more.” Each stanza’s concluding line of trimeter is always effective, but never more than here, with its frank admission of the most basic animal need – for “comfort”.

In stanza two, the poet concedes the limits of her “building” metaphor, and creates a specific picture of an English coastal landscape, in which she conjures flowers instantly out of the earth. The day is now bigger than a stage-set, although Benson continues to highlight her original metaphor, as in the third stanza image of peace being “painted” on the sky, and the making of “immense and misty seas …”

Besides a separation from her country, there’s the implied rift with a “Secret Friend”. The capitalisation here seems a childish gesture. I don’t know how easily a female poet in 1918 could have solved the problem Benson has set herself, but some Imagist sidestepping might have been recommended. It would have helped her case for “Secret Friend” if she’d at least dropped the capitalisation.

Despite its moments of sentimentality, Benson’s poem doesn’t lack intensity and originality. The confessional tone of voice is effective. The speaker trusts the reader with her introspective project, in which simple diction and repetitions imply genuine candour and vulnerability. Do the hexameter lines provide a little too much space to fill? Here and there, perhaps, but at the same time, the rhythms add to the insistence of the speaker, the authority of her first-person account of things.

The closing trimeter line of the last stanza emphasises the pathos of her new metaphorical turn: she has built a wall, not a house, and her cherished “To-day” is already fading into nightfall, although the claim to sanctuary remains defiant.

Benson’s focus was primarily on fiction and journalism. It seems that Twenty was the only full collection of her poems to have been published during her lifetime. A late-awarded distinction is that two other Benson poems appear in Philip Larkin’s 1972 Oxford Anthology of 20th Century English Verse. (Perhaps this was at Monica Jones’s suggestion? But Larkin takes credit for agreeing!)

Cancer is a subject the poet laureate Simon Armitage has always shied away from. “I find it very daunting,” he said. “I’ve lost friends and family to cancer.”

But when he was commissioned to write a poem to mark World Cancer Day, he was forced to confront the realities of the disease. “I think I saw part of my task as being slightly demystifying and maybe de-mythologising or de-demonising cancer a little bit to myself,” Armitage said.

He was asked to write the poem, titled The Campaign, by Yorkshire Cancer Research, a charity that funds research and works with people affected by cancer across his native Yorkshire.

“My initial thoughts, as with every commission, is that I can’t do this, don’t really know where to start,” Armitage said. “But that’s the challenge really, and I like the idea that the subject is the sort of puzzle, and the poem is the solution.”

In Yorkshire, someone is diagnosed with cancer every 17 minutes. Before writing the poem, Armitage met with 17 people from across Yorkshire – researchers, families, fundraisers and people living with cancer – at the Yorkshire Cancer Research centre in Harrogate.

“The thing that really galvanised everything for me was spending time at the centre,” he said. “That was incredibly inspiring, very moving as well, and I think that’s always the place where poetry wants to go to, to the emotional part.”

He added: “I knew that I didn’t want to write something mawkish and sentimental, particularly because on the day I went to the centre there was a huge amount of optimism and hope in the room.”

One of the people Armitage met was Gary Lovelace, a former headteacher who lives with stage 4 kidney cancer.

“What was important for me was it finishes on a positive note,” Lovelace said, “with the classic line at the end of turning Yorkshire into a verb and saying, ‘we keep on Yorkshiring on’ I thought was a really inspirational finish, and I found it powerful.”

“Reading it I found I had all those emotions,” he said. “But hearing Simon speak with his dialect, his Yorkshire voice, his pace, his intonation, just really brought it to life, and made it a very special piece of work for me.”

Dr Kathryn Scott, the chief executive of Yorkshire Cancer Research, said when she first read the poem: “I have to admit, I had a little tear in my eye.”

The charity commissioned the poem because, she said, “of our centenary year and really wanting to mark it with something a bit different, and something that is there in perpetuity, something that’s a real symbol of that milestone of 100 years”.

The metaphorical dragon that features in the poem is taken from a speech by the charity’s first honorary secretary, Sir Harold Mackintosh, who, in a speech marking its first public fundraising appeal in January 1926, at the Queen’s Hotel in Leeds, issued a call across Yorkshire to “deliver the attack upon cancer, the great enemy of mankind, and become the new Saint George in the work of slaying the dragon”.

“I can understand how some people might be a bit more pragmatic,” Lovelace said. “Say, yeah, I don’t want a poem, I want better tablets or I want a cure or whatever. But from my point of view, we’re all real people, we’re all emotional people, what makes us feel good is good for us.”

He added: “I do believe if you live with cancer in a positive way, then that’s better for you. And Simon’s poem … will make people feel good.

“I think it will inform people a little bit, but it will make people feel good, whilst not underestimating the tasks ahead. So I don’t think we should ever underestimate the power of poems.”

Similarly, Armitage, who has been poet laureate since 2019, said poetry had “evolved very subtly and very well to the age that we live in” and the medium was in “a very healthy place”.

“It’s amazing really, I know I get very tired of people saying that young people, younger generations aren’t interested in poetry, they absolutely are,” he said.

“They’re fanatically interested in language, and they might not manifest it and transmit it in the same way that I did when I was growing up, but poetry has proved itself to be unkillable from the very beginning.”

He added: “My feeling is that the poetry is in a very healthy place and I think maybe in a world where we’re surrounded by 360-degree noise, 24 hours a day, not all of it trustworthy, if you get a poem, which is one person saying something that they’ve thought about, and they really believe in, it becomes very valuable.”

The Campaign

Because we famously speak as we find
we said the word cancer out loud, called it a dragon,
went looking for trouble and picked a fight.
When it reared up in the liver we went into action,
outflanked it, stoned it with tablets and pills.
When it hid in the kidneys or blood we rootled it out,
chased it into the open then shooed it over the hill.

Whenever it raised its serpent’s head we slapped it
hard in the mush with a giant charity cheque,
baited it, lured it out of its lair then zapped it
with photons, protons, compounds and hormones,
messed with its atoms and cells till its forked tongue
was tongue-tied, and tied its forked tail in knots.

When it hunkered down in the prostate gland
or made a nest for itself in the bladder or bowel
we caught it on camera, waylaid it with magnets,
tracked and traced it across the body’s ridings
and wolds, through ginnels and snickets,
then galloped against it with needles for lances,
aimed wave after wave of invisible bullets
into its bitter heart, bamboozled its dark soul.

When it perched on the breast we clipped its wings
with skilful hands; when it smouldered and skulked
in the lungs or roared with its fiery breath
we drowned it with thousands of voices, tamed it
with words and songs. When it tainted the skin
with its presence we pierced its scales, punctured
its plated hide, flummoxed it right to the core.

When it prowled in the mind we outfoxed it,
killed it with kindness, ran rings around it
with marathons, pram races, tea dances, car rallies,
left it behind in the trolley dash, laughed in its face,
stood shoulder to shoulder, held hands, linked arms,
and flew a white rose on a flag wherever it fell.

But the job isn’t over, the work isn’t done;
it broods and lurks in organs and genes,
muscles in on our lives, so we push forward,
keep slaying the dragon inside, keep Yorkshiring on.

Now, Mother, What’s the Matter?

Only the monsters do not have troubled hearts.
Life is for troubled hearts. Art is for troubled
hearts. For my whole life, Hamlet has been
a bridge between. Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother,
what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something
is always the matter, and not just for mothers.
(As I write this, the Angelus rings.) Every
character in Hamlet is troubled, there are
no monsters in it. I render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s — everything is
troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar
is troubled. I render unto God the things
that are God’s and feel — want to feel? Do feel —
that God is troubled. I also render unto art.
But I have no idea what art is. What
Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ is. What
the luminous chaos of The Portrait of
a Lady is. What The Pilgrim’s Progress is.
My feet knew the way before I opened
the book: that just before the gate to heaven
is yet another hole to hell.

Richard W Halperin was born in Chicago to an Irish mother, and an American father with Russian ancestry. Early in his childhood the family moved to New York. He taught for a short period at Hunter College, and subsequently made a career in education administration, latterly with Unesco in Paris, where he currently lives.

Now, Mother, What’s the Matter? is from the New Poems section of All the Tattered Stars: Selected and New Poems published by Salmon Poetry in 2023 to celebrate Halperin’s 80th birthday.

The New York School’s influence is audible in his work’s refreshing lightness of texture. Halperin is deeply serious, though, about the function and power of art, cinema and the literary arts in particular. Considering the impact of a poem sequence by an unnamed writer, he says of their portrayal of daughterhood, “None of this is my experience, / All of it is my experience. / Don’t tell me I cannot be daughter.”

Hamlet’s address to his mother, Gertrude, which forms the current poem’s title, is freighted with his still-to-be-spoken accusation – of lechery and adultery with his uncle, Claudius, if not direct connivance in the murder of his father, King Hamlet. Halperin, abandoning quote marks or footnotes, cleverly escapes Shakespeare at the same time, and allows himself a little dry fun with the ideal of universality. The unanchored question inevitably sheds some of its specific complexity, and starts to look like a sentence a contemporary son or daughter might utter to a mother who is entirely innocent of the dangerous “matter” associated with Gertrude. Perhaps, as the child’s emphatic “Now” might suggest, this mother is overdoing some small complaint, and the words are uttered with mockery or exasperation rather than complete earnestness (though the latter isn’t impossible). Halperin’s artfully expanded context demonstrates the subjectivity of artistic interpretation.

His speaker goes on to renew, lightly, the seriousness associated with the original context. The near-euphemism “troubled hearts” suggests a complex perspective from which to read Hamlet’s mother and the play’s other characters – in fact, mothers and “others” in general. Hamlet, the play, has always been the speaker’s bridge between “life” and “art”, he says, since both are “for troubled hearts”. “Hamlet’s ‘Now, mother, / what’s the matter?’ is life on earth. Something / is always the matter, and not just for mothers.” Art permits self-recognition: it brings “troubled hearts” into an encounter with themselves.

This “matter” is gracefully expressed, with the interrupting comment from the Angelus bell pertinently timed. The Angelus marks the incarnation of Christ announced when the Angel Gabriel visits the Virgin Mary. It’s now that Halperin’s denial of there being any “monsters” in Hamlet makes a sharpened point. Art offers a route out of the judgmental “monsters v angels” binaries of religion, though not, of course, a route out of the problems of morality.

In the agreed obligation to Caesar, referencing Christ’s words from Matthew 22:21, Halperin projects himself into that imperial political scene and updates it: “I render unto Caesar / the things that are Caesar’s — everything is / troubled there and, if I am lucky, Caesar / is troubled. I render unto God the things / that are God’s and feel — want to feel? — do feel / that God is troubled. I also render unto art.”

Being “troubled” might be less of a guarantee of compassion than hoped. But the cleverly nervous enjambment that sustains a biblical and colloquial mix of register encourages tentative optimism.

As the speaker disarmingly confesses, he has “no idea what art is”. Art seems more demanding than any Caesar. The intransitive form of “render” in “I also render unto art” suggests more than self-giving service – the possibility of psychic “rending”, for example.

The three literary texts the speaker cites later seem random, but may have a common theme of pilgrimage, one that might stretch to include both the heroine of The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer, and the poet Edward Thomas. The concept admits Halperin’s persona, too: “My feet knew the way before I opened / the book”. The mind is pre-patterned with the traditional techniques of storytelling. What the speaker unquestioningly knows is “that just before the gate to heaven / is yet another hole to hell.” That conclusion is surprising and suggests the unilluminable: then we remember the poet Dante, who illuminated the hell holes, too. Without irony, Halperin reveals the magnitude of the literary pilgrimage.

Drama and fiction, poetry and allegory, are consolidated by the last three lines; “troubled hearts” and “holes to hell” are always integral. To travel these worlds, without rejecting the human-ness of the misnamed demons and monsters, may be another foundational characteristic of literary art.