BELIEF
JOAN BAKEWELL TALKS TO ANDREW MOTION
BBC Radio 3 Christmas Day at 7.00pm / 3 March 2001 at 2200

Joan Bakewell Good evening. Nowadays, there are more beliefs than ever before and more ways of believing. Religious traditionalists see this as a crisis, but for many of other disciplines, it represents a freedom to examine new ideas and reach individual conclusions.

In this new series, I examine this diversity of belief at a time when many people are confused and unsure about their own and seeking guidance from the insights of others. Tonight, I explore what a poet believes.

The nature of poetry is to have its own truth, to concentrate in the genius of words the unique vision of the poet. Poets have a truth that is other than that of the scientist or the theologian, though they may also share some of their specific beliefs. The poet is endowed by us with the mission of a spirit set free to soar in the realms of light and bring back messages to us more earth bound souls. So, what are those messages?

Andrew Motion has been a poet since the age of 16 and Poet Laureate since May 1999. An admirer of Keats and of Philip Larkin, he's also Larkin's biographer. His own poetry reflects that admiration though over the years, he's established his own voice both lyrical and personal. He's a founder of the modern narrative school of poetry and in more literal terms, he's professor of creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

So Andrew Motion, if I can begin by putting to you a quotation from George Bernard Shaw: "I believe", he wrote " in Michaelangelo, Velazquez and Rembrandt. In the might of design, the mystery of colour, the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting and the message of art that has made these hands blest."

So, the question to you is, is art the new religion of our time?"

Andrew Motion No, I don't believe it's the new religion, as your question makes it sound, ie a kind of isolated, replacement thing. I don't believe that, but I do believe that some of the things that art has been able to do and that writing in particular has been able to do over the generations has amounted to a kind of activity which we might suppose runs parallel to or even in tandem with um, more orthodox kinds of religious faith. That is to say that art can have consoling, therapeutic, salubrious, humanising values - forces even - in much the same way that orthodox religion can have and I think, very interestingly, within that Shaw quote is an idea of the permanence of art - art that works - which is also very important and in a sense priest-like too, or God like; I mean I don't mean to say that writers, painters themselves are god-like but there is something to do with the idea of permanence in art which is, of course, compatible to or sympathetic with the idea that more orthodox religious people have of wanting to find a continuing defining shape that religion might give them.

Joan Bakewell So does that mean that you as a poet have something of the role that the priesthood once had for people without faith, that they look to you for the sort of truths about life that they once sought in the church?

Andrew Motion Well, that might be true. I think that before we go more deeply into it and it is a very complicated question, that, we immediately need to establish something which is that art makes a separation between its creator and itself in a way that priests probably don't or probably don't feel they have to and the fact is that you write a poem, you might be the most appalling human being, but you might be able to write a wonderful poem and as we cast our eye over the annals of literary history, we can see that on the whole, there is very little compatibility between the idea of excellent people and excellent work whereas a priest we would expect to be able to make some parallel between the way in which he or she lived their lives and the message they were putting out - they would in that sense be exemplary people, as well as delivering an exemplary message.

Joan Bakewell But I must ask, does that excuse you from being or trying to lead an exemplary life?

Andrew Motion Well, I try as well as I can, but I don't always succeed, in fact I often fail absolutely miserably and it's a matter of great concern to me but I have made the separation between the person I am and the work that I produce, that is certainly true, but I have not used that separation as an excuse for behaving in a lousy way - the lousiness happens for other reasons, but it's not licensed by that.

Joan Bakewell Did you grow up in a devout home?

Andrew Motion Yes, I did. My father, who is still alive, is a devout Christian of an absolutely classic , I'm inclined to say Church of England kind. He lives in the countryside and he goes to church in the country village, he's been a church warden for many, many, many years and my mother who's been dead for a good long while now also went to church in a regular way and when she was ill and she was ill, seriously ill after an accident for the last 10 years of her life, questions of faith and regular worship did matter to her a great deal and they mattered during that time to us in a very particular way, too, I mean us being her family, my brother, my father and myself.

Joan Bakewell But before we come to that, because I know that was a major crisis in your life, let's speak of your unhappiness at school, because you were sent away to school and sent away quite young to a very unhappy life at prep school where you said prayers at night and slept with your hand on the Bible, a touching picture of a small boy…

Andrew Motion I don't mean to sound too pathetic but it is true …

Joan Bakewell No, it's pain, it speaks of pain that …

Andrew Motion … fear as well …

Joan Bakewell And I wonder what was happening to your values, and how you were formulating your values or your belief in God and this Bible you were clinging to at that time.

Andrew Motion I think I had like a lot of children a very, very crude idea of what faith was there for, which was to help me in time of trouble and even as an adult, I still think that there's not very much wrong with that idea, though what I do mean to say is that I had a rather sort of literal version of it then and I thought that if I could somehow get God on my side or make a direct appeal to him, that he wouldn't let me down and that he might make me do my Latin prep better so that I wouldn't get whacked, or whatever was going to happen and I had very elaborate rituals of worship. I used to say the Lord's Prayer seven times - don't ask me why now, somehow the idea had got into my head that seven was a lucky number - it was certainly long enough to keep me awake for a good long time so I felt that I was putting something in and therefore I might get something back, um …

Joan Bakewell Were your prayers answered?

Andrew Motion Hard to say. Um, I think that I probably would have persuaded myself that they were because by some semi-miraculous process term used to end and I would go home and be happier again, so you can see this is all pretty low flying philosophically, at that stage.

Joan Bakewell You've written of course a great deal about your mother who died so young and you spoke in one phrase of the idyll of her company. This relationship with your mother was particularly close and unclouded, it seems, so her influence must have been very great on what you grew to believe?

Andrew Motion Yes, I think the influence of her personality was very strong on me - she was a very sweet natured, kind, but also amusing and kind of up for life person, very good mixture in fact, with a strong, sort of moral structure to her life and strong set of beliefs so I'm sure that went in very but, I think it's probably true to say that the things that I was made to think about by her accident and by its long, extraordinary sort of limbo-like consequence which in a sense was a sort of after-life - a sort of visible breathing after life for her, and one which entailed us in a kind of afterlife as well.

Joan Bakewell I think it needs explaining that at the age of 42, she was a regular rider and went out riding on this occasion with your brother - you weren't there, and fell and suffered damage to her brain that put her in a coma for three years…

Andrew Motion … from which she very slowly lifted back to a sort of talking life again - she never left hospital but she did slowly lift back towards society …

Joan Bakewell … and you were 16 at this time …

Andrew Motion I was 16, 17 when it happened.

Joan Bakewell And this must have been so traumatic that it presumably left a shadow ever since, I mean you don't really want to lose that shadow, do you?

Andrew Motion Well that's a very good way of putting it, but of course there are lots of questions in what you've just said and I think the first one is yes, it was absolutely the defining thing for my life and even though I'm now 48 and it's all a long time ago, I realise on a more or less daily basis that the things that I think about how life is shaped and what we can expect from it and what we have to do with it in order to feel that we're leading a pointful existence are almost all predicated on my experience during the 10 years of her illness. Essentially to do with a notion of life's randomness. On bad days, that idea of randomness turns into something more sort of actually malicious or malevolent, by which I mean that if life can take the opportunity to turn round and give you a good kicking, it will, but that is only on the bad days. On most days, normal days, I just think, you better look out because it will get you if it can.

Joan Bakewell You were 16 when this happened, so presumably you were already experiencing the turbulence of adolescence. Did you rail against your God for what had happened?

Andrew Motion Yes, I think up to that point, my religious beliefs had been, as I was saying, pretty simplistic really though they were beginning to modify. I'd been to this loathsome prep school was one which had very regular patterns of religious worship and so on. I then went to public school called Radley College, outside Oxford which had been an Oxford movement foundation originally and although some of that had worn off, it nevertheless was a very clear religious structure to it, chapel everyday, chapel on Sundays and so on, more extended worship on Sundays, and I was very, very interested in it and sometimes used to go more than once a day and in that sort of swooning, obsessive way that adolescents can have towards these things and almost immediately after my mother's accident, I started to walk away from it. I just thought, this is so crazily unfair and so much a betrayal of all the thingsthat I have believed in, again I realised how simplistic this must sound and certainly was at the time but it was very fierce and I think it's probably true to say that I almost instantly lost my faith and not in a particularly traumatic way though, I mean when we think now about 19th century people losing or moderating their faith, Newman being a very good example of somebody who had to go through all sorts of someone who had to go through all kinds of hoops to redefine and redescribe his faith, it takes up most of his life - I mean I did it in about a week and at the end of the week, thought well, what was that and it was just like a snake shedding its skin. The loss of faith wasn't a crisis. What had happened was a crisis and I then put all my kind of emotional energy on to being concerned with that, with my mother and what was happening to her and trying to design a sort of secular philosophy which made some sense of it, which is what sustained me for the next several years.

Joan Bakewell Well I can see that being at such a bedside is a more sacred place to be than simply a ritual service in school and what did you learn at that bedside about the nature of life?

Andrew Motion Well, I realise that this will make me sound like an absolutely, kind of number one Puritan person who spends the rest of their life trying to come up with ideas which might help to in some sense compensate for an absent mother, what I decided to do, in fact I can remember kneeling down by my parents bed the day after her accident when it was still by no means clear whether she was going to live or die and talking to God and saying, if you let her live I will do the following things which were really to do with work - I hadn't been at all a talented or energetic school child, I was simply bad at work and I did very badly at exams. I had started to get interested in English literature because I'd just come into contact with a very inspiring teacher, but I knew nothing about it - it was a very un-bookish household too so this was all sort of out of nowhere and that's what I did - that's the deal I made. I have to say that since then, there have been many occasions on which I wished that I hadn't said that because I think it would have been kinder to my mother if she'd died sooner.

Joan Bakewell So, in a sense, you feel that if your prayer, if the trade off deal that you had offered God had been answered, you would be responsible for prolonging her suffering. Do you remain feeling guilty about that?

Andrew Motion I have very mixed feelings about it. Um, well, one side of the argument goes, it would have been kinder to her and it might have been easier for us, frankly, too if she hadn't lived for such a long time, in such circumstances, in such pain on the one hand. On the other hand, I have tried to do things with my life which are useful to others in some respects. I don't mean that to make that sound goody goody but that's the fact of the matter and I have an idea of public service which is important to my sense of myself.

Joan Bakewell You spoke of an inspirational teacher. That's always a very formative influence in anybody's life - you were very fortunate.

Andrew Motion Extremely fortunate. And I must say I have yet to meet the writer who hasn't had one. I think such a person particularly at such a crucial time in the evolution of a self, can have an absolutely shatteringly changing effect and that was certainly what this man managed to do to me. In a quiet way, just by pointing me at things and then allowing it to seem quite normal to talk about poems and what they might contain and how they work and so on, which is what I feel now of course, about them, I mean they are absolutely the central thing in life.

Joan Bakewell And poetry has got a different role in society today than it had in the time of your much admired Keats, or indeed of any of, …Tennyson - any of your previous Laureates of the 19th century particularly where it was central to their lives and not at all, as you express in one of your essays, seen as a "sissy" activity.

Andrew Motion Quite.

Joan Bakewell So what is the poet about today and what is he able to do?

Andrew Motion I don't suppose essentially, it's very different from what the poet has been able to do on a good day of over, all the previous generations we care to count and it's certainly true that the lessons of our predecessors as poets come down to us in very graphic forms. But there is one quite interesting difference, I think about as it were, precisely now, which is that because, partly because we live in a happily diffuse and diverse culture and are conscious of that in new ways, in ways that Tennyson certainly wasn't conscious of them, Keats wasn't conscious of them or even that Philip Larkin wasn't conscious of them, perhaps one of the consequences of of our self-awareness in that respect, about living in a more diverse, diffused culture has produced a notion of poetries rather than poetry. I must say I think about this a great deal in relation to Laureate matters because it would be simply bonkers of me to pretend or to make out to myself that any poem I wrote was written in a language that was somehow centred enough to speak for all people in the country, I mean it just isn't like that anymore and probably never was, either. But if you just compare what I've just said with what Tennyson might have said in a similar situation, he could writing the Charge of the Light Brigade, for instance, um write a poem feeling reasonably confident, that the mood of the poem was one to which the national bosom would return an echo, in a language which was broadly recognised as being the language in which these kind of things were conducted and spoken about. Well, that sensor has gone, very interestingly it's gone, so what do I do about that? What does somebody in my situation do about that? I think there are probably a number of solutions to the question, or responses to the question and mine has been to say, rightly or wrongly, for good or for ill, I was appointed because I write poems which are pretty personal. The personal voice, the highly individuated voice can say something rather interesting about individuation in a public place, so what I've told myself is to go on writing the sorts of poems, better if I can since my life changed in respect of being appointed Laureate and let's hear the individual personal voice, alongside the voice of politicians, journalists, social commentators, historians anybody else you care to mention in public places and see what the effect is.

Joan Bakewell Indeed, you've written poems on the marriage of Prince Edward and Sophie Rees Jones, poems for the TUC, the Paddington rail disaster, you've written about bullying for Childline and about the Millennium, the Salvation Army, so you clearly do see and you've already spoken of how your life changed when you became Laureate, you have taken a very high profile. But Andrew, just to go back to the moment when you became Laureate, people were very unkind about it, they said you were a compromised candidate, that you were a bureaucrat and also that you had in a sense hoped to get the job.

Andrew Motion Um, I no more wanted that job than anybody else who was being talked about and I think crudely what happened is that people looked at my CV, thought that I'd been at private school and had worked for the Arts Council and therefore I was such and such a sort of person and I have to say that I think people have been rather surprised by the way I have gone about it since.

Joan Bakewell I only raise it to indicate that you're , the division you made between the poetry and the poets is quite true because poets were extremely divided and not at all generous to you and I wondered whether that rather shook your faith in the discipline of what you were all meant to be doing which has some sort of sanctity and good manners about it, that they should behave so badly.

Andrew Motion Well, it did and it didn't. I mean it did in the sense that nobody likes unpleasant things being said about them in public. It didn't in that exactly the same thing happened when Ted Hughes was appointed and so on back, I mean it's England and one of the few difficult in this sense about doing a job like this is that you just have to put up with a certain amount of that.

Joan Bakewell So do you see this job as poet, not simply Poet Laureate but being a poet as having a moral purpose itself?

Andrew Motion Well I do in the sense that I think that poems, well literature in general and for my money, poems in particular though I don't expect anyone who doesn't love poems to agree with this, does enshrine … certain humane values to do with independence of thought, to do with trying to crystallise ways of thinking and feeling about the really important big things in our lives, falling in love, fear of death, death itself, missing people, the countryside, I mean whatever the kind of six big subjects are living in cities these days. So yes, I do see a moral value, a salubrious value in literature and I must say I've been very influenced in thinking about it in this way by John Keats who is the poet I admire above all others, not perhaps so much for his poems because I think you can identify various other poets who without much argument are bigger and better poets, Wordsworth, for instance, whom I also, well adore, frankly. But the way that Keats speaks about poems in his letters and the role that he sees for literature and the salubrious effects that he imagines that it can have, are profoundly heartening and a lot of Keats' ideas are based on his reading about literature and are generally based on his readings of Shakespeare who does precisely encode, dramatise everything you can imagine - what makes Shakespeare among other things, as Keats so brilliantly says, is his ability never to come to the front of the stage and wag his finger at us and tell us what to think but to endlessly put us in situations in which the moral choice is ours. In a sense there's not much doubt that Iago is a baddy in some way, but it's not as cut and dried as that and in its lack of cut and dried-ness, we the listeners, the readers or the watchers are invited to continually ask the questions that he dramatises of ourselves as well as of him and that's what I mean about it creating an independence of mind which is profoundly humanising.

Joan Bakewell Now that has important repercussions for your own beliefs really, because as you say, as a poet you deal with the six big questions, mortality and so on, purpose, existence of God, life after death, thus and thus but you don't offer answers. Is that right - that you don't feel you have answers or it isn't your task to provide them for others?

Andrew Motion I think if I were a different kind of poet I would feel that I might be able to moralise in a way which did allow me to offer an answer, but my view of what poetry does best and the reason it matters to me so deeply is essentially to do with being in the best possible sense in two minds about everything.

Joan Bakewell What is your concept of God, then?

Andrew Motion Before I came on this programme, I told my children what I was going to do, coming to talk to you and they said, "What are you going to say Dad?" and I said, I haven't got a clue, partly because my mind veers about it so much, we began by talking about confusion and frankly, I do feel confused about it, um I think my concept of God has got very little to do with last things. It's not really to do with death and what happens after death, or might happen after death…

Joan Bakewell The creator?

Andrew Motion No, I don't believe in that. That's biology and Darwin. For me. But I believe terrifically in the value of the numinous and I would like to give it a name - well I can call it beauty, I can call it beauty and truth and often do. But there are days now when I think well, I might as well call it God. In other words, I mean, straight church goers will be in despair at hearing this I daresay, but I want to think of God in the world and I want to think of It in relation to good deeds of course, but also in relation to ideas of creation, making things, defining our humanity, extending our humanity, through, through making. Through making things which you can share with other people.

Joan Bakewell You spoke of a critical point in your thoughts along these lines at the moment. Now you are 48, recently 48, so it's the middle of a life span or …

Andrew Motion Mmmm, might be …

Joan Bakewell Might be, certainly it's the time of the mid-life crisis Can you expand that a little bit?

Andrew Motion Oh, I've had my midlife crisis, that's alright. I'm now having my late midlife crisis. Um. I think that er, it probably is to do simply with the years going by but it's also to do with a greater sense of devotion in me, what I think that I'm here to do which is to write and to try and broaden the opportunities for poetry in culture generally because given that I believe what I do believe about the humanising effects of literature in particular and art in general, it would be very strange of me not to try and create opportunities for that to be more widely heard and enjoyed. It has a certain amount to do with worrying about death, um.

Joan Bakewell You had a scare in 1996 when you had a tumour on your spine.

Andrew Motion I did, yes. I thought I was going to die then - and I realised then that I wasn't in the least bit frightened of dying - I'm not, actually frightened of dying at all. I mean I know that I'll see you tomorrow and I'll have changed my mind about a lot of things, but I don't think I'll have changed my mind about that, I'm not frightened of dying - in deed there are plenty of days when I quite look forward to it, to be honest.

Joan Bakewell What do you think death is?

Andrew Motion Nothing. I mean, the only thing that keeps me awake sweating at night is that there might be something after all in which case I might have to think about my life for an eternity and that would be pretty grim. I just want to go out like a light.

Joan Bakewell You wrote in a poem and I think it was your voice speaking in "It is an offence", "I admit that I also yearn to leave my mark on society". What are the priorities of that, Andrew, is it the public figure, or is it the private poet?

Andrew Motion It was slightly tongue in cheek, that poem, so you mustn't take it quite as it stands but given what I've said about wanting to make things which last, I mean whether I've succeeded or not in doing this, you and I will never know because we won't be here to see.

Joan Bakewell And yet, wishing to leave a trace in time, you recently I understand burnt a great many of your own papers.

Andrew Motion Not recently, um there was a time when I got rid of some stuff - it was when I was writing Larkin um, they weren't so shaming, I mean I never killed anybody and yet,

Joan Bakewell You have a sense of shame?

Andrew Motion Don't we all?

Joan Bakewell It's pernicious though…

Andrew Motion Yes, it's vile. I do.

Joan Bakewell Is that the legacy of offending your God?

Andrew Motion It might be to do with offending God, it's more obviously to do with offending a sense of moral values that I have invented for myself which I haven't always been able to live up to.

Joan Bakewell And they sit easily? You feel comfortable within them?

Andrew Motion No I don't, I just think that any other way to live would be very difficult for me. That isn't to say that they're always very difficult to live with either, they're not very difficult to live with and particularly not when I feel I've betrayed them in any way, but they're mine and I go on trying.

Joan Bakewell So as of now, how would you describe your moral outlook?

Andrew Motion It's got a terrific amount to do with making things, as you've gathered. It's got a lot to do with spreading the word in a way that might I suppose be described as evangelical but on behalf of literature itself and the values that it contains for me, um. The reason I'm stalling slightly as I say this is that I can see what I would like to happen next. Shortly before my mother had her accident, I got very interested in Catholicism and I sent off for a lot of pamphlets and I can remember rather pompously sitting around reading these things in a sort of semi-showing off way, but also genuinely interested and I think there is an obvious point to make between the rituals of art and the rituals of religion um, I find myself getting more interested in it again now. When I go to worship, I like going to high church places, not low church places and I would like to believe more - more nearly in a received idea of God than I do. I have a great obstacle though, which is, and I know this is going to sound rather simple minded as well. At the same time as I was angry with this sort of child version of God, I also started reading seriously for the first time and, frankly, thinking seriously for the first time as well and my thinking then as now, led me to think hard about the historical and political context of any given idea and I quickly realised that I had a great deal of difficulty with the meek. What I mean about that is that I don't have any difficulty with the meek themselves, far from it, but I do have difficulty with the idea that if you're having a hard time on earth because you're impoverished and you can't break out of it, or because dreadful things happen to you um, tough as it is, it's in some sense OK, because after it's all over, you go to heaven. The meek shall inherit the earth, I mean the meek get their reward somewhere down the track. And I just don't believe that.

Joan Bakewell And is it that… I get the sense from what you're saying that perhaps you might be moving the pamphlets, having been there in your youth, being the Catholic church, moving towards the Catholic church?

Andrew Motion I think that would be fair to say. I mean the point about the political/historical context with the meek of course is that you realise that if, that a great deal of the Old and New Testaments arises out of a set of extremely embattled cultures, in which people are routinely having a fantastically hard time so of course they come up with an idea of the meek in order to have a sense of deferred gratification built deeply into this faith. Well, I mean there are so many dangers attached to that, that would be wonderful to see not endlessly repeated and one of them of course is simply, very simply to do with the fact of creating more opportunities for the meek to be un-meek in the sense that we're using the word at the moment so that they can have their reward here and now as well as possibly later on.

Joan Bakewell I hope you resolve the dilemma. Andrew Motion thank you very much.

Andrew Motion Thank you.

 



































Picture This:
For the 100th birthday of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother
Andrew Motion
Wednesday July 19, 2000
The Guardian


My dream of your birthday
is more like a wedding -
the August sky
confused with confetti,
no, not with confetti,
with photograph-falls
where the steady gaze
of the century's eyes
captures your ages
unguarded or posed.

1905: CHILDHOOD

Nobody heard the blackbird chink-chinking
on the level lawn but it was always there,
declaiming its birthright; and nobody saw
how lichen blistering the drive had mixed
green and gold in stubborn coats-of-arms,
but they clung on. The frame of everything
was Glamis with its battlements and towers,
and you side-saddle on your boxy grey
inside the moment as it froze and held:
your life your own and all the world unknown.

1914-18: SERVICE

The shutter opens and the world expands.
It's Hawtrey at the Colly for your birthday
but he can't be heard, or not heard
as he wants - outside, along St Martin's Lane,
a people-torrent runs and will not wait
to get the enemy. The show goes on.
And then goes on elsewhere, in wards
where nursing changes strangers into brothers
while your real brothers pack their bags
and leave as strangers, or else go for good.

1923: MARRIAGE

Jazz, New Look, new plunging necklaces
and snap! you're cornered in a studio
where beauty holds its own but loses edge
and makes a soft advertisement for love.
For love which finds its focus as a bride
and keeps its nerve, and sees its way,
then rides the shimmer of its own delight
returning to the world the gift it gives
in private - tongue-tied tongue set loose,
the head confirming what the heart believes.

1937: CORONATION

In public; chairs into thrones; people
to subjects, and the shudder of transition
rippling through the camera's eye - his sombre face
an effigy as inescapably the crown
is lowered; your face tender with the load
it brings to bear, and what it means to hear
beyond the shooshing satins and the stone
Guernica crumbling, fire in Palestine,
and Germany again - earth groaning
as it shifts its weight and stalls in misery.

1940: BLITZ

THE PALACE CUP: then comes the blast
and choking lift that brings you where
you look East Enders in the face - not land
exactly now but roof-spars, earth-in-shreds,
a gluey crater which was once indoors,
and you as one of us - or like enough
to make a crowd of wind-frayed kids
and peering mums, and husbands jostling
with the press-men in their burly coats,
all think you are. And thank their lucky stars.

1952: WIDOWHOOD

Basalt blackness at his funeral
and basalt stillness: through your veil
the fossil-face of grief, the stricken gaze
which bounces back the flash-lights to their source
but masks a working brain, and sees the years
and years ahead the way an acrobat
might see a tightrope and the audience
below: the dizzy space, the camera-pops,
the swaying line between thin air and ground
and every single step bourne up by company.

1960: THE FAMILY

The years wind on, the world and family
develop into colour and due season: winter
poppies, Spring in May, the grassy Ascot drive
half summer-greeting, half-acknowledgement.
And everything a system made of signs: the marches
past, foundation stones, the plaques and special trees
which prove your life in ours yet make it seem
a secret too - the way a salmon swells in secret
through the currents of a pool you stand beside,
and glances at your fly, and keeps its course.

1997: LATE ON

No changes, on the face of it: the balconies,
the open smile and wave, the garden parties,
and the hats, the hats, the hats, all pictures
in our albums or our heads along with these:
the photos no-one took of you -
the grandmother-confessor-friend, the mourner
at divorces and the rest, the worldly watcher
of the world who shows the world no changes
on the face of it: the balconies, the open wave
and smile, the hats, the hats, the hats.

My dream of your birthday
is more like a wedding,
the August sky
confused with confetti,
and lit with the flash
of our camera-gaze -
the century's eyes
of homage and duty
which understand best
the persistence of love.












The Hands On Laureate

Since Andrew Motion became Poet Laureate in May, bookshops have sold out of his work. Faber are busy reprinting his poetry and biographies (of Keats, Philip Larkin, Edward Thomas) and this interview was slotted in after lunch with Culture Secretary Chris Smith. The shrill sound of faxes arriving punctuated our chat. That's what it means to be Poet Laureate at the tail end of the twentieth century. Motion lives in a large house in Tufnell Park with his second wife Jan Dalley and their children. We talked in his eyrie of a study where he writes poems down longhand in black ink before transcribing them onto a word processor.

JH: Did you want to be Poet Laureate, or a poet of renown, very early on?
AM: I didn't want to be Poet Laureate as a little boy! I really didn't think of it in those terms. And to say I wanted to become a poet "of renown" aged 14 would make me seem even more odious than I probably was at that age. But as soon as I started writing poems in earnest, which was slightly later, in my first A level year, I almost immediately felt my life was possessed by poetry. It was in the early days of Careers Advice in schools and I remember this person saying to me, "What are you going to do when you grow up?" and me saying, "I am a poet" in a preposterous way. He said, "Well, there's nothing to say to you then". I'm telling this story against myself, but it goes to show I did feel very devoted to it.
JH: Why do you think you felt this strong a commitment?
AM: Partly because nobody else in the school (Radley College, near Oxford) was interested in poetry, and partly because nobody read much in my family. So there was no expectation of my being interested in that kind of thing. It never crossed my mind that my devotion to poetry would somehow translate into a public version of itself. And yet even then, the question of who might read the stuff occurred to me. Do you write for yourself? Are you writing for your friends? Are you writing to try to get your girlfriend to give you a kiss? The question of the audience and the society for poems was there in a very inchoate form.
JH: What was your first achieved poem?
AM: I wrote almost every day at school - poems of absolutely no distinction whatever. Can I remember any lines? Well, they didn't really have lines, they just want on about me-me-me. My life, my anxieties, absolutely typical adolescent inverted peerings and probings. I was reading French Symbolist poets mainly, which didn't do much for my logic, but a lot for my addiction to words. I was just spilling over with words. Then my mother had her terrible accident, and it just unavoidably presented me with a subject. It sounds cold-hearted to say it, but it focussed these adolescent ramblings....
But to answer your question at last: the first poem I pushed out and thought, That's better, is a little poem called 'In the Attic' which I wrote when I was 20. It took about thirty seconds to write. I'd been reading Hawk in the Rain and my new first wife and I were living in the country outside Oxford in the attic of an old rectory, living on love and cider.
JH: Were you pleased?
AM: I felt an accelerated version of what I always feel when I want to write: I mean, that feeling Frost describes so beautifully as "a lump in the throat, a lovesickness, a homesickness". It's the feeling that there's something which has already existed, that you're trying to remember. And when I wrote 'In the Attic' I thought: It's better organised, it more nearly captured that past sense. I also thought: If I've done it once, maybe I can do it again. But that's one of the delusions of youth - that if you can do it once, you're already on a steady upward trajectory, but it ain't like that.
JH: You refer to this experience, you mother's riding accident and death, in many of your poems dealing with other kinds of love, your wife, your children. Do you think there's a kind of survivor's guilt?
AM: I honestly think that if she'd been killed instantly, we might not be having this conversation. What was especially grim was the was betwixt and between for ten years, not really alive and not quite dead. So we couldn't post the parcel of our grief. What I've tried to do, in poetic terms and as a way of getting through my life, is concentrate very precisely on the facts of the accident, make them as telling and revelatory as possible, but also to use what happened as a way of characterising a whole range of experience that might not refer to her at all. In other words, to try and understand or re-describe it as a view of the world - a view which encompasses randomness, the point of suffering, generational issues and with the sense of all our lives heading in one direction: towards death. These are the subjects of poets though the ages, but I think my intense longing to go on writing about those things has as much to do with the fact that she went on suffering for such a long time, as it has to do with the accident itself.
JH: In your earliest book, Goodnestone (Workshop New Poetry, 1972) you write "The weight of love / Is what loads me down". Do you agree there's often a quotient of pain in your view of love?
AM: I'm afraid that's probably true. The poem I wrote for my wife Jan, 'On the Table' is a bit more cheerful. But my view of poetry generally attracts me to subjects which have a sense of loss or deprivation or unfulfillment. Over the years, I have tried to enlarge the reference, so that it's not just a case of my sitting down and saying me-me-me as I did when I was young. I feel what Keats talks about when he says, "Axioms of Philosophy not being Axioms until they're proved upon our pulses" is completely right. I want to take the particular examples of grief, suffering, loss that I have encountered, and more recently the experience of being ill myself, and present them as a larger picture of what I think life is like. And I'm afraid I do think life is like that. It doesn't mean I am incapable of being happy, though I think as you get older, it gets more difficult. I think your capacity for joy, for jouissance, diminished. It's a long time since I had any of those careless laughing raptures. (He laughed).
JH: Seamus Heaney talked about the Laureate creating a "sacred space" for poetry, Larkin refused what he dubbed the "representing-British-poetry in the 'Poetry Conference at Belgrade' side of it". What's your job description?
AM: I think that Heaney, like Hughes, has a very well developed sense of what Ted called "the sacred trust of poetry" - and although it's a grand phrase, I want to say "So do I". Whatever feelings about monarchy, whatever your politics, whatever your poetic politics, we ought to be able to agree that poetry does have an element of sacred trust about it. One of the things I want to do is defend poetry in the most general way. I think part of the pleasure of the job of Laureate is that there isn't a job description. Effectively, it comes in two parts - there's the doing part and the writing part. The writing part has a better developed tradition around it; you write poems for royal occasions sometimes, depending on whether you can. I'm very keen to make those poems part of a larger pattern of poems about public events. Events in the life of the nation, political things. On the other hand, there's the doing bit, which has less of a tradition. Some Poet Laureates have done a lot, some have done absolutely nothing. I intend to do a very great deal - I'm going to get closely involved in educational matters, raising the profile of poetry in schools. I've got all kinds of meetings lined up with everybody from The Poetry Society through to the Department of Education and the British Council. I've also got ideas for independent initiatives, to do with raising money to provide places where poets can go to do their work uninterrupted. I want to edit a regular series of poems about national events, solicited from well-known poets and people who haven't published before. I want to do a gigantic anthology for schools called The Poetry Book. I want to persuade Radio 3 or 4 or both to have a regular series of poetry lectures with programmes introducing the work of other writers. I also want to wake up the committee of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and possibly make that a big annual event.
JH: John Betjeman wrote a good poem on 'The Death of George V' before becoming Laureate, a terrible 'Ballad on the Investiture 1969' after his appointment. Are you worried about the effect on the quality of your work?
AM: It doesn't quite worry me, but it certainly concerns me. I am aware it's a completely no-win situation: I'm damned if I do, damned if I don't. I've thought about that and about the flak-taking. An I thought a lot about the invasion of my private space. I decided there was something so interesting and creative to do for the whole community of poets, I'd take the risk. I think the stimulation to write other kinds of poetry might actually be rather good for me.
JH: You have said you want to broaden the role of Laureate to be a kind of voice for the nation, speaking on national questions. Have you written anything about the Kosovan war?
AM: I've been commissioned recently by the Endillion quartet to write poems to go between the section of Haydn's Seven Last Words, which will be performed next year. It's a very exciting, beguiling task seven sections, about 1,000 lines in all. One of the sections is about the Kosovan refugees. How extractable it is, I don't know. It's the life story of a pushchair which is wheeled out of some ethnically cleansed village, then is dumped in a refugee camp. It's not about the people, although they are all around, it's just about the pushchair. We'll see how it works. I must say, I do want to engage with great public issues, but I believe Keats was right again when he said: we hate poetry which has a palpable design on us. It's almost invariably true that poems which deal best with public events are poems which don't come at them like a bull at a gate. The best poems about the troubles in Northern Ireland, for instance, are not poems about bombs going off in pubs, but Seamus Heaney's poems about bog people. You have to find a way for proceeding in your intended direction by indirections. For a poet like me, who is quiet and personal and yes, private, it is quite a test to write about public things. I have to find a private way to tackle them. If I were more of a rhymster, a Tony Harrison, I'd find a way to aim at them more directly. But I'm not, can't be and I don't want to be.
JH: 'Lines of Desire' is about your affection for Wilfred Owen and your affection for Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas and your feelings about war. Anthony Thwaite describes your poetry as "traditionalist", yet you're experimental here. Is that the wrong adjective for your poetry?
AM: It is odd that I'm always described as traditional when in fact I'm not. To be honest, I look at the poems in Selected Poems - 'Lines of Desire' and 'Salt Water' and several others - and I think: well, these aren't traditional exactly, though they might be interested in tradition. One of the odd things about the past few days is that I now feel there's another Andrew Motion going around in the newspapers who is barely recognisable. And I don't just mean, although this is part of the problem, that his age is wrong, the names of his friends and his family are wrong, the dates are wrong, the account of the poems is wrong!
JH: The response to your appointment has been predictavb;y mixed: some enthusiatic, some critical. On the negative side, The Andrew Motion that's emerged could be described as a possibly-bisexual-Establishment-not-good-enough-poet-biographer, couldn't he?
AM: My sense of it all is this: there was a lot of begrudging during the first week, when I was fortunately out of the country. Then it steeply turned round, with much more friendly things being written.
JH: Do you want to correct the political inaccuracy. Would you have accepted the job of Laureate under a Conservative Government?
AM: I think so, if I could have controlled the job description. But it's questionable whether I would have been offered it, since I've been a member of the Labour Party for a long time.
JH: Have you started writing the epithalamium (wedding poem) for Prince Edward yet? Do you think a traditional form such as a sonnet will suit this commission?
AM: I can't really say without having written the poem. But I'm inclined to think a traditional form would work. When I was asked to write the Diana poem - which is something else everybody gets wrong - it wasn't a convulsion by me, but a commission I was happy to accept, I immediately found myself thinking the way to do it best was to drop into some lapidary, Housman-ish, blocked-off, stanzaic form. Partly because writing in strict form helps you to a thought, as somebody said, but also because it has a kind of dignity which helps. I can see myself using quite conventional forms for these sorts of poems.
JH: Wouldn't it also help you avoid poems like Ted Hughes' work about the Queen Mother?
AM; The furious, devout, drench poem, you mean. Well,, although Ted got a lot of flak for his Laureate poems, I think he was onto something very interesting, trying to look beyond the personalities involved to something - in his sense of the word - primitive. A connection between poetry and monarchy, between monarchy and landscape. A Pike-like Englishness which was always his subject.
JH: You are also in charge of the University of East Anglia's famous creative writing course. Do you think poetry is an art or a craft, and can writing be taught?
AM: I don't think it's possible to make something from nothing, but since the people on my course are already so good by the time they join, this isn't a problem. The standard of applicants is really very high, with about 500 applying for about 40 places. Some of them don't need much help at all, but even these need editing. With those who are in more of a muddle, I can do more substantial work, saying: You need a new character here, or Your descriptive writing is no good. I'm in Norwich two days a week and I love it. It's important for me to have a base outside London. I love the landscape - surprising for a supposedly metropolitan poet!
JH: A kind of poetry war was posited by the media, with opposite forces headed by you and Carol Ann Duffy. Did it bother you?
AM: I have the greatest respect for Carol Ann Duffy as a person and as a poet. To suggest there's bad blood between her and me is ridiculous. I regret it's been presented like this. It's Press mischief. I've spent a lot of time over the last years tearing down the barriers which did exist between schools of poets, and hope in future to make sure they stay down. This imagined opposition between types of poet is largely garbage, as is the phrase "people's poet". Is Benjamin Zephaniah more or less of a people's poet than Seamus Heaney? It's a false dichotomy. We live in a poetic society that is happily as diverse as our political society.
JH: How does a poem begin for you? Obviously the poems for Haydn's Seven Last Words were a commission, but how did you start?
AM: Poems really do begin with that inarticulate longing to rehabilitate something that's been forgotten or vanquished. It's a music I start with, sad music, without words. Then an idea I've got in my conscious mind attached itself - or something I've read or heard. Before I start writing in my notebook, I've written about half the poem in my head, often in the middle of the night, when the children were small. I still sleep badly and often write in the night. It's reassuring to have the first half of a poem in my head before I sort it out on the page. It means I'm paying attention to the sound and gives confidence, like the run-up to a jump. I revise a lot on the page and a lot after a poem has appeared in a magazine, before it's in a book. I even rewrote quite a lot of the poems in Selected Poems.
JH: Did you become sparer?
AM: Clearer. What irritated me about my earlier poems was that they kept going out of focus. Going off at a bit of a tangent now: one of the things I've always felt is that writing is bliss compared to speaking. You have the chance of getting right what you want to say. When you're speaking in interviews and elsewhere, there are so many other pressures which don't exist when you're writing. I feel a completely free agent - it's quiet, it's free, I'm completely my own person. If some people don't like what I write, I feel that I won't be surprised; there'll be others who will. Which in turn prompts me to say: I'm always being described as a quite-voiced, mild-mannered sort of person. But in fact most things I've done in my life have caused a row of one sort or another. There was a row about the Penguin anthology, a row about the Larkin book, a row about the Keats book - with people who don't like politics with their poetry. I have always believed valuable things happen at the point of an argument. Be your own person and time will sort the rest out.
JH: Are you a poet or biographer?
AM: I'm a poet who writes biography. I am interested in biography, probably because I'm a person who has an adequate imagination but not much power of invention. With biography, you're given the plot. But poetry is central to my existence and dictates the shape of every day. The other work I do is taken because it's flexible enough to allow me to write poetry.
JH: Keats, Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin are the subjects of your three greatest biographies. Is there a link?
AM: Maybe. Although I'm very admiring of Keats' poetry, it's his Letters I feel closest to. I revered Edward Thomas and his long sinuous sentences, which play the unit of the sentence against the unit of a phrase and the unit of the rhyme. I've learnt a lot from Thomas. Larkin is a more robust, more direct poet. I'm sure I have taken things from him too, but I'm not sure what. It's good for poets not to be too canny about their thefts and borrowings; such things relate to the side of the mind that needs to remain unconscious - the primeval swamp side.
JH: What is your ambition now?
AM; I've no higher ambition than to write a poem that someone wants to read in 100 years.
JH: Which of your poems is that likely to be?
AM: The one I'm going to write next! It's hard to tell, poems have odd lives. The ones that do most in the short term don't necessarily last. Although some, like 'Dover Beach' or 'In Memoriam' arrive impressively and endure for ever.
JH: Will you be able to retain the subversive nature of a poet's activity?
AM: I think poetry means writing against the grain, writing in borrowed time. There's an unsubmissiveness about it. Although I'll be using my time as Poet Laureate to make things happen, I want to make sure I "speak truth to power" as Hazlitt said. Poetry should never speak on behalf of power.








Hotlines to the nation's heart

Poet Laureate Andrew Motion argues that he doesn't have to be an establishment stooge. In poetry, the personal is political
Download the full transcipt of the lecture at the Arts Council website

Saturday March 11, 2000
The Guardian

Poetry is an art which depends on solitary reflection. The relationship between a poem and its reader is always one-to-one, even when that poem is being recited to a room full of people. We receive it individually, interpret it through the filter of our own individual memories and expectations, and recognise its power as being inseparable from our deep feelings. Indeed, poems are a hot-line to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.

I remember being impressed by this in the days after Princess Diana was killed. Like many, I went to gaze at that lake of flowers outside Kensington Palace and I was struck by how many thousands of the bouquets had verses attached . The same thing happened months later, when flowers in memory of those killed by the Soho bomb were laid out in Soho Square. Almost all those flowers were also accompanied by a poem. Most, to be frank, were not really literature, but that isn't the point. The point is: in distress, people had turned to poetry because they felt that it allowed them to express their feelings in a way that prose could not. The same thing happens at moments of intense pleasure and celebration as well - when we fall in love, when we get married, and so on.

Poetry is sanctified by a sense that it helps us to enjoy and endure our existence. It stretches our humanity - not just in the sense that it tells truth to power, and deepens our knowledge of the human condition, but in the sense that it can have an actually liberalising effect on our natures.

Liberalising how? Think of Shakespeare. Shakespeare never comes to the front of the stage and wags his finger at us, telling us what to think. His characters dramatise good and evil, folly and wisdom, foresight and expediency. We are always being put on the spot, invited to make decisions and distinctions, having to choose between what is sensible and what is unworkable. This is why Keats loved him so much, and what Keats referred to when he said in one of his letters: "Axioms in philosophy are not axioms unless they are proved upon our pulses." He meant that writers can tell us what is right and what is wrong until they are blue in the face; we will only believe them when we feel it.

Public poetry is poetry about an event or a person (or people) of general interest. Famous examples would be Tennyson's Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington, or his Charge of the Light Brigade:

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wonder'd.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!

But when we ask ourselves what makes these poems public, and whether their public element has something to do with the fact that Tennyson wrote them when he was Poet Laureate, things immediately get more complicated.

After all, Tennyson wrote a great deal of other kinds of poetry when he was Laureate and many of these are not public in anything like the same sense. It is the language of the Ode and of the Charge which defines their publicness as much as their subject. Something in the language which has to do with their being written for a largely sympathetic audience; something to do with their apprehension of national values; and something to do with their sense of what is heroic and fine.

The Charge is, in a way, a war poem, but one with very different aims from war poems by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. Where the language of Tennyson's poem is consensual, and feels confident that it shares the thoughts and attitudes of the vast majority of its readers, the language of Owen's and Sassoon's work is not. While their poems do most certainly express a generally-held loathing of war and suffering, they do so in ways which are hostile to authority and which seek to tear the veils of ignorance from the eyes of those who had no idea about the reality of life in the trenches. Their refusal to make large rhetorical gestures is a part of this adversarial spirit. They deliberately avoid using a language which smacks of broadly-based public discourse, because that language has been tainted by those who use it to deceive the public.

Listen to the chastening modesties of Owen's The Send Off:

Down the close darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.

Their breasts were struck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead...

... Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild train-loads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,

May creep back, silent, to still village wells,
Up half-known roads.

The great poets of the first world war destroyed hard-core Victorian public poetry, sealing it in its own world, and making it difficult for later offshoots, Kipling's poetry, to lead a secure life. But their strategies were not entirely new. Their satires and polemics owed a great deal to previous satirists and polemicists - to members of the Victorian awkward-squad, to the Augustans before them, and back through history.

And as we notice this, we want to say the same thing about successful satires which have been produced in our own time. About Tony Harrison's V, or certain poems by Wendy Cope, or others by Philip Larkin. Satire creates as clear-cut a relationship with its audience as Tennyson does in a poem like the Charge.

Owen and Sassoon helped create a kind of public writing we still recognise today, and this involved a vitally adversarial spirit. But this spirit can and must express itself within poems by doing more than openly attacking enemies and disbelievers. The example of John Keats will help show what I mean. We're accustomed to the idea that the young Wordsworth and the young Coleridge were radically dissenting figures, so much so that at one time they were suspected of being spies for the French. We know, too, that Shelley was a firebrand all the days of his short life. We know about William Blake.

But generally speaking we've been brought up to think of Keats as an odd man out. While his contemporaries struggled to turn themselves into unacknowledged legislators in the liberal cause, he flopped around on beds of lilies, panting luxuriously, dreaming about sex or death or both together.

But the time-honoured views of Keats's genius completely miss the point about how his work engages with the real world of politics and public affairs. It's easy to see why. Think of Shelley's great poem, The Mask of Anarchy, with its unforgettable and unforgotten attack on Castlereagh. We see at once that we are dealing with a public poem of the most passionate and overt kind:

I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh -
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

One year later, in 1820, Keats wrote To Autumn, a poem which has often been taken as proof of how escapist its author was - how he refused to have anything to do with the various oppressions and cruelties that Shelley savages in the Mask. But if we trace Keats's involvement with liberal politics through his early friendship with radicals like Leigh Hunt, and remember that To Autumn was written in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, shortly after Keats had seen the dissenting orator Henry Hunt making his triumphant entry into London, we might be more willing to look for signs of its public sympathies and involvements. Sympathies which were triggered, not just by outbursts of repressive violence like the massacre itself, but by the long-serving Tory government's campaign to secure a regime of prejudice and disastrous inequality - one which included the repeated suspension of habeus corpus. Here's the last verse:

Where are the songs of Spring?
Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too -
While barred clouds bloom the soft dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue:
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives and dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourne;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

In the previous two stanzas of the poem, we've been shown a landscape which is so tense and bulging with fruitfulness, it's only a fraction short of becoming rotten. And also one in which certain living things have to keep up a ferocious workrate (I'm thinking of the bees and those "more /And still more, later flowers"). In the same way, what we have in these 10 lines is a picture of abundance which is profoundly troubled and troubling: the day is "soft-dying", admittedly, but it is dying; the gnats are "mournful"; the lambs and the robin are only days away from winter, and the swallows - well, the swallows are about to leave the country, just as Keats's brother George had recently emigrated to America to escape what Keats referred to in one of his letters as the "burden" of contemporary politics.

What we have in To Autumn is a poem which is self-evidently unlike the kind we find Shelley writing in The Mask of Anarchy. It is a poem which registers the pressure and shock of its contemporary moment, and is full of anxiety and foreboding - but which transmutes those feelings into organic and pastoral terms. It is, in its refractions and assimilations, profoundly conscious of public life, and we do it a great disservice if we are not alive to this ingredient and intention.

I want to give one more example of this kind of double-level writing. Edward Thomas, who incidentally wrote a very good book about Keats, was killed at the Battle of Arras in April 1917, but virtually all his poems were written during the time he spent in England between enlisting and crossing the Channel. When we read him, we should not expect to find descriptions of trenches and mud and slaughter . But does this make him any less of a war poet than Owen or Sassoon?

Not in my book it doesn't. It means that we are conscious of the war in his work in much the same way that we are conscious of contemporary politics in Keats. As an example, here is the beginning of the poem The Sun Used to Shine, written in May 1916, in which Thomas remembers a walk that he took with his friend, the American poet Robert Frost, through the fields near Ledbury in Gloucestershire:

The sun used to shine while we two walked
Slowly together, paused and started
Again, and sometimes mused, sometimes talked
As either pleased, and, cheerfully parted

Each night. We never disagreed
Which gate to rest on. The to be
And the late past we gave small heed.
We turned from men or poetry

To rumours of the war remote
Only till both stood disinclined
For aught but the yellow flavorous coat
Of an apple wasps had undermined;
Or a sentry of dark betonies,
The stateliest of small flowers on earth,
At the forest verge; or crocuses
Pale purple as if they had their birth
In sunless Hades fields.

The war, though "remote", shows up more clearly here than the Peterloo Massacre does in Keats's "To Autumn". But the same imaginative principle applies in both poems. Like Keats, Thomas feels the weight of a particular public moment, and rather than addressing it directly, he responds in a way which is resolutely personal, transformative and sensuous. He rises to the challenge of the instant, but seeks out general truths and durable verities. For these reasons, we would do well to think of Keats and Thomas, and of other poets who work in the same way, as "active" poets rather than "reactive" ones.

Instead of Tennyson's direct assault on a subject, we have a layered approach; instead of heroic types, we have wary individuals; instead of a ringingly centered language, we have highly personalised voices. What is public in Thomas has nothing to do with plinths and trumpets.

I wrote my graduate thesis on Edward Thomas 25 years ago, and ever since then he has remained an exemplary figure for me. As, of course, has Keats. But while it would be true to say that they are in my mind most days, they have lived in me even more vividly and vigorously since I was appointed Poet Laureate, and have deeply influenced the ways that I have thought about writing public poems. Tennyson is the Laureate I most admire and his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington opens:

Bury the Great Duke
With an empire's lamentation,
Let us bury the Great Duke
To the noise of the mourning of a mighty nation,
Mourning when their leaders fall,
Warriors carry the warrior's pall,
And sorrow darkens hamlet and hall.

Tennyson had a sure sense of what was established and inviolable in his world. Grieving for what he calls elsewhere in the poem the "foremost captain of his time" he hears the sound of not just a "nation weeping", but of a whole empire, and does his best to articulate mass-sorrow in an appropriately booming language. The authority of the poem depends on his having no doubts about the rightness of this. It leaves no cracks in its structure through which questions about Wellington's politics might appear, or scepticism about the state's motives when it sent him on his various campaigns, or anxiety about the existence and operation of empire itself.

Wellington is a straight up and down hero - the latest in a distinguished line. God, we deduce, really must be an Englishman if he can see Wellington's worth so accurately:

He is gone who seem'd so great -
Gone; but nothing can bereave him
Of the force he made his own
Being here, and we believe him
Something far advanced in State,
And that he wears a truer crown
Than any wreath that man can weave him.
Speak no more of his renown,
Lay your earthly fancies down,
And in the vast cathedral leave him.
God accept him, Christ receive him

It's easy to mock this kind of thing. Its rhetoric drowns out the questions we would like to raise. This is why I refer to it as a hardcore public poem. Even if Tennyson knew that he lived in a society made up of different societies. he didn't have any hesitation in speaking "for the nation" when the occasion demanded it. But what is a poet to do today when invited to respond to a "national occasion"?

It is a commonplace, but one worth repeating, to say that much of the delight we take in our contemporary society has to do with its diversity. This is absolutely not to say "there is no such thing as society", but to insist on its many facets, faiths, components and interests. There was a good deal of discussion about this last May, around the time of my appointment as Laureate. How can any one poet, a person who inevitably has a certain background, attitude, and take on the world, be expected to speak for everybody in their country? How can they avoid missing out on large sections of the community? Can they escape becoming a stooge of royalty or the government? How can they seem properly inclusive without becoming bland?

At the outset, I told myself that I had been appointed because I had written what I had written - and that I should resist any pressures to turn myself into a different kind of writer. That's to say I knew that I was a personal kind of poet, and felt that I should therefore respond to occasions in a personal way: as a private citizen, putting my work into a public space without any illusions that I would necessarily echo universally-held thoughts and opinions.

This decision has had at least three consequences. One, obviously, is to do with tone - my determination to continue using the same sort of speaking voice that I have always used. One is to do with the subjects themselves - my decision to honour the tradition of writing poems about events in the royal calendar but to make such poems part of a larger pattern of writing about other kinds of public event. And one is to do with approach - with that willingness I admire in Keats and Thomas - to look around or beyond a specific event.

I'm not trying to suggest that I want to shy away from the reality of these events, rather that I want to engage with them, while at the same time remaining alert to their general, symbolic or even allegorical values. The poem I wrote for the wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys Jones is one which wants to remind its readers of the questions which preoccupy all people in love and getting married: will the things we say today last into the future, how will we cope with our changing selves?

In the same spirit, the poem I wrote for the TUC, in spite of their good-natured suggestion that I should concentrate on international trade relations, was about individual liberty. The poem I wrote about the Paddington rail disaster focuses on that tragedy, but refers to other kinds of bereavements and brutal severings. So too, in the poem I wrote about the millennium, I was concerned with the unceasing flow of time rather than the jerk of a minute-hand at one specific moment.

And in the poem about bullying that I wrote for the charity Childline, printed in this newspaper last week, I tried to draw broad conclusions from a specific instance. If I had written any of these poems in another way, I'm certain that I would have been lured into writing to order, into dittying, or into thinking too precisely on the event for the good of the poem. In every case I had a phrase from Keats's letters resonating in my head: "We hate poetry that has a palpable design on us."

Andrew Marvell's Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland goes about its public business in ways that seem to me exemplary. Although not in any sense a publicly-funded poem, its rare qualities nevertheless vitalise those issues of freedom and choice which have been my constant refrain.

Marvell has been given a certain amount of stick for seeming in two minds about almost everything. TS Eliot, famously, called him a "lukewarm partisan" and it's certainly true that there is something elusive about Marvell's character, and something in his work that we slide off, however much we admire it. Think of all those little sealed entities he gives us in his lyric poems - the drops of dew and the thrush's eyes. Their high polish makes it difficult for us to get a purchase, in the same way that their circularity seems to exclude us.

In the Horatian Ode, we are not so much held at arm's length as impelled to share a balanced opinion. The poem was probably written in 1650, shortly after Cromwell had returned from his campaign in Ireland and before he began his campaign in Scotland - a campaign which his Lieutenant-General, Fairfax, refused to lead. Because Marvell later worked as the tutor to Fairfax's daughter at Nun Appleton House in Yorkshire, it's often supposed that the poem's point of view is not really Marvell's at all, but his future employer's. In fact there is no evidence to suggest that Marvell even knew Fairfax when he wrote the poem. Its balance is entirely his own, and entirely characteristic.

As a matter of hard fact, Marvell in 1650 regarded Cromwell as someone whose private life was beyond reproach but whose policies were Machiavellian. In the poem, he offers us Cromwell as a man without personal ambition who is bent on upholding an ideal of impartial justice.

Though justice against fate complain,
And plead the ancient rights in vain:
But those do hold or break
As men are strong or weak.

There is, of course, a way of reading this which would make Marvell seem credulous. But in truth the power of the poem lies in its detachment - detachment which is most clearly on show in the celebrated lines describing the execution of Charles I:

He nothing common did or mean
Upon that memorable scene:
But with his keener eye
The axe's edge did try:
Nor called the Gods with vulgar spite
To vindicate his helpless Right,
But bowed his comely head
Down as upon a bed.

As Cromwell's unofficial Laureate, Marvell deals brilliantly with the question of how to address public issues in a way which is at once engaged and independent. Living through a time of revolutionary change, he does not respond as a propagandist for one side or another, but as someone bearing witness to interior realities.

This is the quality that needs to be defended in public writing: the ability to stand outside an event, even to transform it, while registering its pressures and importance. It is the quality I especially admire in Keats - and not only Keats. Matthew Arnold, who thought more deeply about the nature and role of public art than most, also reminds us of Marvellian virtues when he tells us that during periods of turbulence and rapid change, artists should avoid the temptation to "lend a hand at uprooting certain definite evils". The point is not that writers or artists of any kind should hide their heads in the sand, but that they have the opportunity to take a longer and larger view. A view of events within time, and within the flux of the self.

• This is an edited extract from a speech given by Andrew Motion at the Royal Society of Arts this week

















The Water Tower

Andrew Motion
Saturday July 22, 2000
The Guardian

If a drilling rig clanked inland
and made a stand
in some corner of a barley field -

its elephant legs
and pendulous cable-guts
cleaned up and bleached and thinned

by the massage of a summer wind
to four stocky struts,
its platform also stripped

to a whitewashed cell
with eyes turned everywhere at once -
if such a thing were possible

or worth imagining,
this water tower would be the best result.
Or maybe it dropped in from outer space.

Or then again maybe
its white and height are really like
a lighthouse that the sea

shrank back from then forgot.
That doesn't matter any more.
What does is how,

some forty years ago and recently
arrived to settle hereabouts,
I made this tower the furthest

fixed point of a walk
and stood where I am now,
four-square inside the circle

of its influence, and thought
these fields of silver-whiskered barley,
dog-rose hedges, gravel lanes



ash- and beech-tree spinnies
where the roe-deer live their secret lives,
would never seem so nearly

elements which made a grand design
if not for this: incomprehensible
and silent at the heart of things.

Except the silence broke.
It's over there! that's what I heard -
a joke against the ear

as if a bird had spoken, or the air
rubbed hard enough against itself
to squeak - a joke

I put to rest by saying carefully:
there must be men at work
inside the tower. It's over there!

The same words tumbled down again,
by which I understood I must be due
for home,

so barely heard them as I made my way
along those gravel lanes.
These gravel lanes, I mean -

the same today as then, although
I'm killing time in just a visit now,
not life at home

and what was over there
I reached and passed
and moved away from years ago,

and still can't see - as like the wind
parading through the barley
while I leave the shadow of the tower

and finish here
as anything: a single cat's paw
dabbing gingerly one minute,

then a solid blow
which batters down the heads so far
I think they won't recover.

What is given
Poet Laureate Andrew Motion

TakeWilliam Legge, who once upon a time
was forty-three, a barrister, and lived
in comfort with the wife and child he loved,
and didn’t care if this might make things tame

since happiness, or what he knew of it,
depended on him working out the place
where everything was most itself, the space
it best belonged in, and preserving that

no matter what, which meant that come the day
his car slid off a B road, slowing down
correctly as they travelled out of town
to take a break, and lost its way

at once among short grass and little stones
and ended in the cold arms of an ash
collapsed there years before, which made the crash
hard proof that something out of place was prone

to cause catastrophe, and killed his wife
and child by folding sharply in-
wards on itself, he had no discipline
to settle him, no stable law for life,

just randomness - a chaos like the sight
on cloudless nights of stars with shooting stars
rip-roaring nowhere in particular.
Or are they planes? Or are they satellites?


Take William, or Will
as he has become,

stripped of his name
and his safe estate

now the rush of loss
has dumped him down

in the freezing gaps
of doorways and steps

among others the same,
all fallen from grace

with rats and foxes
and even those codgers

the stinking badgers
who lost their place

among fields and farms
so went to earth

in a shanty town
of cardboard boxes

where passers-by
might sometimes throw

a word or coins,
and later dream

at home and warm
they hear a spine

curve round and creak
against the rain,

or ice-threads snap
when a fuddled head

on its pavement-bed
lifts, then settles back.


Take Will again, his swarming poacher’s coat with long, stuffed pockets, belt of plastic string and gust of moonlight cold. He’s standing there inside the mantle of the hostel light strained forward while the nightmen ask him in but can’t be sure. What is this love built up from faith and charity? Not known to him. They ask again. He stalls and stamps his boots so hard star-splinters frazzle the cement - We only want to know your name, that’s all - and squares himself, hands pushed down deep to grip those pocket-secrets, then leans close enough to smell the food and warmth. My name? He lifts his head. My name is William Legge.









Epithalamium
St George's Chapel, Windsor

One day, the tissue-light through stained glass falls
on vacant stone, on gaping pews, on air
made up of nothing more than atom storms
which whiten silently, then disappear.

The next, all this is charged with brimming life.
A people-river floods those empty pews,
and music-torrents break – but then stops dead
to let two human voices make their vows:

to work – so what is true today remains the truth;
to hope – for privacy and what its secrets show;
to trust – that all the world can offer it will give;
to love – and what it has to understand to grow.

Andrew Motion





























Cost of Life
Andrew Motion

Imagine that autumn dawn coming to grips
with a country station: the way light slips
along the silver stitch-mark of the rails, first,
then strikes the waiting-room and lets its colours burst.
Imagine next the people waiting for their train -
cold feet scuffing the Tarmac's faint frost-grain,
that man there with a Kleenex-snippet stuck
on his shaving cut, this woman here with a fleck
of lipstick on a front tooth, and no one talking
yet, but nodding, or half-smiling, or slow-walking
to stare off the platform's end into open country:
cattle still in their yards, fields lush and empty.
Then imagine the train lashing its hard bend,
the track tingling, doors clunking, someone lend-
ing a hand to someone, taking care with the gap;
remember the palaver, the brisk insistence, the drop
into a seat - mine! - then the cast-away gaze
out through a cloudy window at the dripping maze
of hedges ruffling in the slip-stream, the wet cars
burrowing in lanes, the now-here/now-gone regular
whack of a farm, or an allotment-quilt. Imagine
the sun full-on at last, and clouds melting from
the Cotswolds into the Thames Valley, villages
unravelling into towns, more stops, the carriages
jam-packed now, and papers crackling, the bass line
of a Walkman, a laptop, a mobile phone,
and the brick terraces crushing closer, their black walls
swirling graffiti, damp-dribbles, quick shadow-spills
from fly-overs and scaffolding, then opening ahead
towards the city, its slate-acres hammered out like lead.

Then imagine what happens after - but not for long.
Imagine a single nipped-off second hung
between one moment and the next - a time-dot
in which train, carriages, everything is flung out-
side the world's hard limits of mass and space
and rises up weightless, torn from its proper place.
Then imagine all this weltering down
through gravity onto the earth again;
sleek carriages now sealed chambers where
windows hold tight, ghost-people clamber
so wild and desperate their whole expression is O,
where furious quick dust-storms smear a dry dew-
fall on what survives of tables, chairs, head-rests,
where daily lives doing no more than their best
to stay daily, and continue by daily laws,
are shredded or simply threshed open by fear
which solves nothing, where the unearthly stink
rises of what no one will want to name or think
about later, where even a puffed-up speckled cloud
cannot hide or drown the continuing flame-slides
and metal shrieks, the heartbroken animal cries,
the pop of strong wood giving way, the thin fly-
away whip of cables snapping, the reedy phone
still weeping in the ash-mess hiding human bone.

In the end
imagine how large a silence will descend
as the track is cleared - silence like familiar clay
turned into a mist which stays
Invisible but works its way
back up the rails along the valley floor, and so
enters the towns where one strand or another goes
off by itself to fill the vacant space
which recently was someone's lived-in place.
And yet the mist appears
to grow the more it travels - swelling where the rails
slice back across a lattice-work of lanes
until it finds the Cotswolds and thins out again -
this whisp here escaping underneath a bolted door,
that one slipping through a bed-
room window left ajar, and there, that third
one, slumping at a kitchen table where
a man sits down alone, and stares
like everyone alone will stare
and see no more than featureless
and wasted air.
















A Glass of Wine

Exactly as the setting sun
clips the heel of the garden,

exactly as a pigeon
roosting tries to sing
and ends up moaning,

exactly as the ping
of someone’s automatic carlock
dies into a flock
of tiny echo-aftershocks,

a shapely hand of cloud
emerges from the crowd
of airy nothings that the wind allowed
to tumble over us all day
and points the way

towards its own decay
but not before
a final sunlight-shudder pours
away across our garden-floor

so steadily, so slow
it shows you everything you need to know
about this glass I’m holding out to you,

its open eye
enough to bear the whole weight of the sky.

Andrew Motion















The Game
by Andrew Motion


I must tell you this:
there was a boy - Tommy Prentice.
The afternoon I'm thinking about
he stopped me with a shout
of just my first name,
all friendly-like - no blame,
jealousy, resentment or distrust -
telling me I must
come out with him now
and play - he had friends waiting,
although
it was me that they wanted: without
me
the game was no good. OK?
Of course OK. Tommy Prentice
was tall, hansome, cool, use-
ful at fly-half, with slick, black hair
fringeing his level stare.
And he wanted me? Like I say,
of course it was OK.

We found his friends
where the real garden ends,
or ended, rather, and the wild
began - wild as in where a child
might imagine the worst to lie
hidden in tall grass, in the poked-about eye
of a pond, in the fuzzy shade
a colossal cedar tree made
as it brooded above everything,
its green stratospheres turned to sing
a thin sphere-music which never ends.

Back to those friends.
I cannot get clear
their names, height, numbers etc here -
only that none of them gave a sign,
not so much as one single frown
between them, of what was in store -
though maybe that had more
to do with accident than plan,
maybe (I'm sure if once he began
to explain, Tommy Prentice
would end up saying this)
it was my fault not theirs,
for being lippy, or having fair hair,
or somehow egging them on.

Neither can I say how the game began.
One minute we were standing around
glopping cones into that dead pond,
the next it was World War Two,
the Far East, I was a PoW,
and they were the Japanese.
Ridiculous, everyone agrees,
if ever I tell them. Funny, even.
But for a child raised on the idea of Heaven
and God firmly installed there ...
You get the idea.
After that it was a rope and me
lashed to the cedar tree,
the puzzled bark (like elephant skin close
up) creasing my face,
my dungaree top yanked to my waist,
and my back bare lest
the Japanese, who now saw
a good chance of winning the war,
found it hard
to get me under the guard
of thin air with their bamboo canes -
though since they did so again
and again, I should have said
struck, my voice whipped down the scale
from speech to whisper to whimper to wail
to nothing, as my spirit also sank
away from human into the frank
dependency of a creature
on more powerful natures.
When they eventually let me go
I still did not know
what to say except "Thank you"
softly, admittedly, but "Thank you"
all the same -
leaving Tommy Prentice to some new game
under the impassive cedar tree
tugging the top of my dungarees
gingerly up, my face bearing the mark
of corrugated bark -
fading, but still deep
as if I had just awoken from sleep.


All of Us

Who would ever think
a field full of folk

meant wet eyes and lips
smattered among rose-hips,

and bright shining faces
bobbing in silver grasses?

No, our sense of folk
comes in stadium -hulks,

with steamrollering chants
of implacable want.

But it's all the same.
As we shuttle through time

we might or might not
change skin-colour, forget

history, love God
or prefer ourselves instead.

The question of who we are
still goes on before -

a bow-wave we watch
creaming, but cannot catch.

Or so I thought, at least,
that grey day on the coast

I strode off with my Dad
along a sand-spine made

by wind fighting waves,
him near the end of his life,

me in the middle. Our shoes
gave that definite soft kiss

of people leaving their mark,
but when I look back

the tide had swallowed us both.
That is the truth.
Andrew Motion
THE ROOM

In the white room
at the back of my head
a child lies
on a metal bed,
lies and dreads
that what might come
through the single door
will do him harm;
the man with wires,
or maybe the one
with a flushed face
and butcher’s apron,
or failing that,
the quiet one
who doesn’t bother
with wires or guns,
the one whose way
of giving pain
is to find the room
and leave again
without a word,
the one whose name
the child knows
is yours. Is mine.






















Poem: A Wall in Naples

I have forgotten whatever it was
I wanted to say. Also the way I wanted
to say it. Form and Music.

Perhaps it had something to do with - no,
that's not it. More likely, I should just
look at whatever there is

and fix myself to the earth. This wall,
I mean, which faces me over the street.
Smooth as a shaven chin

but pocked with the holes that scaffolders left
and flicked with an overflow-flag. Which still
leaves pigeon-shit, rain-streaks, washing -

or maybe the whole thing's really a board
where tiny singing meteors strike.
How can we tell what is true? I rest my case.

I rest my case and cannot imagine a hunger
greater than this. For marks.
For messages sent by hand. For signs of life.

Andrew Motion





















Professor Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate: Thank you very much for that gracious introduction, and thank you very much, Congress, for letting me come and read this poem to you.

I understand that I am not the first person to have read a poem here today. (Laughter) Does he want my job? Do I want his? No, thank you! Also, I understand that his rhymed. Time to modernise, perhaps? (Applause)

More sombrely, when I was appointed Poet Laureate earlier this year, I said that I wanted to respect the traditional responsibilities of the post; ie., to write poems about events in the Royal calendar, but I also said that I wanted to make such poems part of a larger pattern of writing, about national issues, national events and matters which are of abiding concern to us all, matters like -- although listing them in this way makes it sound rather ponderous -- individual freedom, the spirit of internationalism in general and Europeanism in particular, and like the need we all have to engage fully with the present at work and in all other respects without feeling either overburdened by the past or compelled to undervalue it. These are themes which I have tried to engage within this poem, but because I am a lyric poet and not a didactic or satirical one, I have tried to let these themes arise naturally from a natural context, naturally and, in a sense, personally, in the hope that the poem's one voice will find echoes in each of you individually.

It is set on the Thames path where I do a lot of walking and the poem is called 'In a perfect world'.

























IN A PERFECT WORLD

I was walking the Thames Path from Richmond
to Westminster, just because I was free
to do so, just for the pleasure of light
filling my head, just for the breeze like a hand
tap-tap-tap-tapping the small of my back,
just for the slow and steady breath of dust
fanning on flints, on cobbles, on squared-off
slab-stones - dust which was marking the time
it takes for a thing to be born, to die,
then to be born again. The puzzled brow
of Parliament filled the distance, ducking
and diving as long parades of tree-clouds
or skinny-ribbed office blocks worked their way
in between. The mouth of the Wandle stuck
its sick tongue out and went. The smoke-scarred walls
of a disused warehouse offered on close
inspection a locked-away world of rust
and sand flecks and slate all hoarding the sun.
That's right: I was walking the Thames Path east
as though I was water myself - each twist
and turn bringing me out on the level,
leading me hither and thither through brick-chinks
into the hush of my clarified head,
into the chamber where one voice speaking
its mind could fathom what liberty means,
and catch the echo of others which ring
round the rim of the world. Catch and hold.
The buttery sum kept casting its light
on everything equally. The soft breeze
did as it always did, and ushered me on.
















Thank you very much. (Applause)

The President: Andrew, thank you very much for that. As somebody who always used to think that poetry should rhyme, if that is new poetry or modernism, then I am a convert. It was lovely. I thank you on behalf of Congress. It is a very welcome addition to our proceedings. (Applause)