Programme 10

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564–1616)
Sonnet 130: My Mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne (1590s)

The poet

William Shakespeare is certainly among the greatest of all writers – and one of the most celebrated figures in English literature. He was brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, where, in 1582, he married Anne Hathaway. They had three children. Shortly after their birth, he left for London, where he joined a theatre company, as an actor and playwright. Shakespeare's plays include histories, tragedies, comedies and pastoral romances. He wrote well over thirty plays (although the number is sometimes disputed as he had collaborators for some of his work).

He was universally popular in his own time and his works have been heralded as the finest ever examples of the use of the English language. Because he was adept at crafting words and sentences, he was instrumental in the changes to the English language that were happening during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare's understanding of the human condition and his ability with language was coupled with a remarkable poetic understanding evident throughout his plays and in his collection of sonnets. His Sonnets appeared in print in 1609 but much of the work was completed in the 1590s. Shakespeare was a shareholder in the theatre company, and owned property in London. He became wealthy, and retired to Stratford in 1613.

Shakespeare's plays are performed more than those of any other dramatist; a testament to the timeless nature of his work.

The poem

My mistres eyes are nothing like the Sunne,
Corrall is farre more red, than her lips red,
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun:
If haires be wiers, black wiers grow on her head:
I have seene Roses damaskt, red and white,
But no such Roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight,
Than in the breath that from my Mistres reekes.
I love to heare her speake, yet well I know,
That Musicke hath a farre more pleasing sound:
I graunt I never saw a goddesse goe,
My Mistres when shee walkes treads on the ground.
        And yet by heaven I thinke my love as rare,
        As any she beli'd with false compare.

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RS THOMAS (1913–2000)
On the Farm (1963)

The poet

Ronald Stuart Thomas was born in Cardiff. He graduated from Bangor University and took his theological training in Llandaff, Cardiff. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1936. In 1940 he married Mildred Eldridge, an English artist. They had one son.

Soon after he was appointed rector of the rural parish of Manafon in Powys during the Second World War, he wrote his first three volumes of verse, introducing what were to become his hallmark themes – nature, Welsh history and the lives of country people.

He was a self-confessed Welsh republican, with outspoken views. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was at the centre of a highly public row when he praised the arsonists who firebombed English-owned holiday homes in Wales, when he claimed that English speakers were destroying the Welsh language and culture.

RS Thomas, was widely regarded as the best religious poet of his time, although his verse covered a wide range of themes writing about faith, nature, the Welsh countryside and landscapes. During a writing career that spanned fifty years he wrote more than twenty volumes of poetry. Among the many literary accolades he received were a Nobel prize nomination and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

The poem

There was Dai Puw. He was no good.
They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
And took the knife from him, when he came home
At late evening with a grin
Like the slash of a knife on his face.

There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
Every evening after the ploughing
With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,
And stare into the tangled fire garden,
Opening his slow lips like a snail.

There was Huw Puw, too. What shall I say?
I have heard him whistling in the hedges
On and on, as though winter
Would never again leave those fields,
And all the trees were deformed.

And lastly there was the girl:
Beauty under some spell of the beast

Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life's dark book
The shrill sentence: God is love.

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LORNA GOODISON (1947–present)
This Is a Hymn (1988)

The poet

Lorna Goodison was born and grew up in Jamaica, where she still has a home. She has taught in Canada and in the United States. She now earns her living as a teacher of creative writing at the University of Michigan. She began her artistic career as a painter and her paintings have been exhibited throughout the Americas and in Europe.

In 1986 she won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for North and South America. Goodison's poetry is firmly rooted in her native Jamaica, which she brings to life in earthy, vital images. She evokes the magic of Jamaica and draws sensitive, at times poignant, but always compassionate portraits of her fellow Jamaicans. Goodison's poems also confront us with her country's tragic past, and she addresses its history of genocide and slavery that shaped its present.

Her work has been translated into several languages, and she has performed at festivals around the world. But she has also read in schools, hospitals, prisons, community centres... to children, workers, people whose lives are not often blessed by poetry.

The poem

For all who ride the trains
all night
sleep on sidewalks and park benches
beneath basements
and abandoned buildings
this is a hymn.

For those whose homes
are the great outdoors
the streets their one big room
for live men asleep in tombs
this is a hymn.

This is a hymn for bag women
pushing rubbish babies
in ridiculous prams
dividing open lots
into elaborate architects' plans.

Mansions of the dispossessed
Magnificence of desperate rooms
Kings and queens of homelessness
Die with empty bottles
Rising from their tombs.

This is a hymn
for all recommending
a bootstrap as a way
to rise with effort
on your part.
This is a hymn
may it renew
what passes for your heart.

This hymn
is for the must-be-blessed
the victims of the world
who know salt best
the world tribe
of the dispossessed

outside the halls of plenty
looking in
this is a benediction
this is a hymn.

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JONATHAN SWIFT (1667–1745)
From Verses on the Death of Dr Swift (1739)

The poet

Jonathan Swift was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. Following the 1689 Jacobite rebellion in Ireland, Swift came to England to work with Sir William Temple, a prominent diplomat and statesman. Swift served as secretary to Temple for the next ten years. In the process, he earned his MA at Oxford.

He was a supporter of the Whigs, but the growing chasm between Whigs and the Church led Swift, in 1708, to launch a series of pamphlet attacks on the Whigs. With the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the Tories fell from favour and Swift returned to Ireland working at various posts in the Church. He served as Dean of St Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin for the rest of his life. He remained bitter but quiet for several years.

Having served his role as an Irish patriot and Tory critic of Whig policies, he attacked English economic policy towards Ireland and suggested a boycott of English goods. The pamphlet was later declared seditious by the British government. He produced a number of politically inspired writings on the state of the Irish economy that culminated in 'Gulliver's Travels' (1726).

Swift died in 1745.

The poem

The Time is not remote, when I
Must by the Course of Nature dye:
When I foresee my special Friends,
Will try to find their private Ends:
Tho' it is hardly understood,
Which way my Death can do them good;
Yet, thus methinks, I hear 'em speak:
  "See, how the Dean begins to break:
Poor Gentleman, he droops apace,
You plainly find it in his Face:
That old Vertigo in his Head,
Will never leave him, till he's dead:
Besides, his Memory decays,
He recollects not what he says;
He cannot call his Friends to Mind;
Forgets the Place where last he din'd:
Plyes you with Stories o'er and o'er,
He told them fifty Times before.

How does he fancy we can sit,
To hear his out-of-fashion'd Wit?
But he takes up with younger Fokes,
Who for his Wine will bear his Jokes:
Faith, he must make his Stories shorter,
Or change his Comrades once a Quarter:
In half the Time, he talks them round;
There must another Sett be found.
For Poetry, he's past his Prime,
He takes an Hour to find a Rhime:
His Fire is out, his Wit decay'd,
His Fancy sunk, his Muse a Jade.
I'd have him throw away his Pen;
But there's no talking to some Men.
And, then their Tenderness appears,
By adding largely to my Years:
He's older than he would be reckon'd,
And well remembers Charles the Second.
  He hardly drinks a Pint of Wine;
  And that, I doubt, is no good Sign.
  His Stomach too begins to fail:
  Last Year we thought him strong and hale;
  But now, he's quite another Thing;
  I wish he may hold out till Spring."
  Then hug themselves, and reason thus:
  "It is not yet so bad with us."

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