To His Coy Mistress

The three poems by dead poets I have chosen to read for last night’s Dead Poets Society challenge by kim881 in Poetics, Uncategorized over at the dVerse Poets Pub are all from poets I studied at school and have continued to love all my life – great teachers have a lot to answer for…

Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress‘ is surely one of the most famous poems of attempted seduction ever written. I live within a day-out’s journey from Marvell’s birthplace, Hull where the muddy tide of Humber is about as wide as the Ganges and I wonder whether sailor’s tales informed Marvell’s poem. The last time I visited Hull, I met two young lovers sitting on the plinth of Andrew Marvell’s lifesize statue and acquainted them with the poem…

WB Yeats was also a favourite at school and later, when I moved to Sligo in the west of Ireland and Yeats’ home town, I was commissioned to paint a mural of the poet and his work and you can see a much younger me from 1995 being interviewed on television whilst up a ladder painting the mural. Searching for a poem suitable for this challenge, I came across The Mask, an unusual (for Yeats) Question and Response format with an ABABA rhyme scheme

Lastly, I chose ‘A Grin‘ from Ted Hughes’ wonderful collection of poems ‘Crow’ although this is not one of the poems referencing the scurrilous Crow. If I had to keep one volume of poetry it would be this…

Having read these three dead poets, I’m afraid I could not write a poem based on just one of them and so my offering below channels all three, Yeats for the form, Ted Hughes for the title and theme and Marvell for the intimations of mortality and perhaps the poetic shot at immortality…

A Grin

‘Centre stage on the birthing bed
Did you grin for your role through the pain?’
‘I thought how easily I could end up dead
And grinned to think you’d never touch me again
Don’t fucking touch me! I shouted!

‘Did you grin at the banality of death by car crash
You who imagined yourself great and with longevity?’
‘I thought of my wife who always thought me rash
And my secretary always seasoning work with levity
Urging me to slow down – but I had to dash…’

‘I watched your grin, my eyes open, yours closed
And wondered, coming together, if we really were?’
‘You were so deep the thought never arose
That we were two, a separate him and her
I never thought at all as into me you flowed…’

‘Whatever before death caused your rictus grin
Will be replaced in time by the skull’s secret smile’
‘What tales within my skull locked in
Now deliquescing, bodily integrity defiled
In the game of Life, none of us can win.’

‘Your poetic attempt at seduction
Already lived three hundred and fifty years
Is poetry the way – immortality to win?’
‘I never won that girl nor any like her
But it makes me grin – the onward admiration…’

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

P.S. I realise now that we were supposed to write based on one of Kim’s chosen three poems but when I saw the challenge last night, my Covid head was stuffed with cotton wool and it is only this morning that I was feeling better sufficiently to write something and by then, the idea that we choose our own three poems had settled in… Sorry Kim! And so below is a response to one of your poem choices Dylan Thomas’ ‘Once It Was the Colour of Saying’.

Once It Was the Colour of Saying

Once a year at least, I listen to
Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas
and steep myself in the poetry of his play
the play of his poetry
as he carries us around the small Welsh town
of his imagination
borne into the night
and through the waking day
revisiting the cast of characters
until we love their foibled ways and wish
like the Reverend Eli Jenkins
in his poem within a poem
“To stroll among our trees and stray
In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down,
And hear the Dewi sing all day,
And never, never leave the town.”

© Andrew Wilson, 2023