Tags
Auden, Epitaph, Ian Hamilton, John Etheridge, Larkin, Philip Larkin, Poem, poetry, The Book of Pain, W.H. Auden, Writing
The scent of old roses and tobacco
Takes me back.
It’s almost twenty years
Since I last saw you
And our half-hearted love affair goes on.
You left me this:
A hand, half-open, motionless
On a green counterpane.
Enough to build
A few melancholy poems on.
If I had touched you then
One of us might have survived.
__________
“Epitaph” by Ian Hamilton, which you’ll find in his excellent Ian Hamilton Collected Poems.
For a fine elucidation of this poem, I refer you to my friend John Etheridge’s blog The Book of Pain. His site is a useful resource for compelling, voiced poetry. It’s title — The Book of Pain — suggests the sort of revealing, forbidding tone that’s also made vivid in Clive James’s great collection The Book of My Enemy.
John calls Hamilton the “finest poet of the second half of the 20th century”; and while I disagree, I don’t dismiss the gauge of such a careful register of language. For the record I think Eliot is the best post-war poet, with Larkin and Auden tied for second.
john said:
Ted Kooser, the recent U.S. Poet Laureate (and an excellent poet himself) suggests that you should read some poetry, even some small amount, every day. It became a piece of advice, once I had it, that I determined to implement. Now having had Ian Hamilton’s “Collected Poems” on my night stand almost exclusively for several months and having read my way through his (sadly small) body of work, I am starting to get an understanding of why he has had such a strong impact on me.
It starts, I think, with his consistent ability to delay but then cause an intense explosion of emotion at the end of his poems. He has an uncanny ability, and one not marred with subterfuge or mere trickery, just good writing, to create incredible tension in the beginning of a poem and to release it with a key phrase that lets the meaning and impact of the poem explode in your head and then heart. The control and delicacy of this is near surgical in his work, which is in such great contrast to the content: pure human emotion at its most raw.
But here’s the really excellent part: in so doing, he is never brutal and never mean spirited. Unlike the sacrificed and hurt friends and family of many poets who are all too ready to bare their private suffering in public, Hamilton is always so honest and gentle with his analysis that I never feel that his writing is rancorous. It is just simply a description of what it was, and if there was any pain to be absorbed or any sense of failure to be carried, he was there to absorb it and carry it. Not in any dramatic, self-made martyr sense, but in the best sense that it can be done: quietly, with nobility and dignity.
Other poets strut in a cascade of loud, long, shouting, obtuse poems. But to me, Hamilton quietly whispers in brief, clear prose, and in so doing, speaks through the clamor sweeter and clearer than anyone else. So yes, to me at least, Hamilton is the finest poet of the second half of the 20th century and it was our damned good luck to have him. Read his poems, please. In the end ‘best of’ discussions are enjoyable when done in a spirit of fun for the love of the genre, but really, there is no hope to win the un-winnable The important point is that Hamilton is a great poet and in reading his work, you will be touched.
Thank you, again, by the way, to The Bully Pulpit for such an unabashedly positive compliment to the Book of Pain! The respect is, of course, always repaid in kind.
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