Smart Devices: 52 Poems from The Guardian 'Poem of the Week'

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Then we’re lifted into a Romantic register again, with “cloudy fancies” and “divine expression.” This initial comparison is vague because it’s difficult to attribute meaning to the phrase “divine expression”. It’s a somewhat Wordsworthian idea: nature as a source of “intimations of immortality” perhaps. The implication could include prayer itself. Longfellow’s next comparison, the “white countenance” as the “confession” of “the troubled heart” is contrastingly specific: the effect is powerful. It carries us to the nub of the verse, the word “grief” in the last line. The emotion is attributed to the sky, of course, but by now the sympathetic reader might suspect something more is going on. It is the first poem in a delightful new 12-poem collection, A Map of Love, which Wynn Thomas has edited for the University of Wales Press. The bilingual collection hops across the centuries from Gwilym to the present, and includes stylish linocuts by the artist, Ruth Jên Evans. It would make a good Valentine’s Day gift, and, if you’re Welsh, you’d only be a little late to offer the collection to a loved one in honour of St Dwynwen, the patron saint of love, whose day was celebrated on 25 January. Again, Gwilym avoids the self-centred lyric rhetoric of an Elizabethan sonneteer or Romantic love poet. Gwilym’s voice always sound natural, even at its most elevated. Here, the diction is flatter, plainer. Even temporary absence is a state of dull, starless loss. To cut to the chase, who wins the argument? Although Slog has the last word in the form of a punchy aphorism, “Windows don’t happen”, he must know, as a poet, that they sometimes do, or at least appear to. Sunlight, both poets would concede, is the necessity: the dilemma concerns the best way to invite it in.

Ronald Stuart Thomas was born in Cardiff in 1913. When he was five, his father, who had served as an officer in the merchant navy, began working for the Irish ferry service and moved the family to Holyhead, described later by Thomas as “a horrible little town with a glorious expanse of cliff and coastal scenery”. Thomas went on to study classics at the University College of North Wales (now Bangor University). Ordained as a minister of the Church of Wales, he subsequently left north for mid-Wales and elsewhere, but still seems to have felt an outsider; his ancestors were mostly English speakers from the south of the country and English was his mother tongue. Although he learned Welsh as a young man, and chose it as the medium for his autobiographical writings, it wasn’t the language of his poetry. Importantly, many of the Watershed poems engage with the human psychology that’s so frequently, and so foolishly, ignored at the present tumultuous “watershed” moment. Padel uncovers the mirror, reveals the universality of climate denial. She allows us a small smile towards our inner Mrs Noah, who tries operatically to resist boarding the Ark, and has to be “dragged up the gangplank / waving a goblet / shouting I will stay with my gossips.” (Rehearsing Noye’s Fludde). On the other hand, there’s the “blast / of climate terror,” the sudden, equally incapacitating sensation “as if a pub in that crystal cave at the end of the world / held a darts match for the blind / and the boards were our bodies … our hearts.” (Lady of the Lake). Few of the poems are as painful as that image, but they all dramatise the loss we face. The third day God saw what was emerging beneath him. The green mist and undulation of land and water: Its modulated rhythm and irritability of split forms Spitting up from the earth's face massed fronds And circular prisms of light. These he watched, startled, until there evolved The springing, active branches of varied leaves, Plants, shrubs and trees. A dishevelled array; A residue of years impelling change of growth. The reptiles unknown to him but already in birth Peered at his curiosity and their own under a Blanching light. The mammals also secure on The tree of life and hidden by its enormous branches of Passing mystery, clutched the young to their breasts.

Earlier poems contain vivid evocations of Welsh village life, and the sound of Welsh English is brilliantly captured in her excursions into dialogue. She was not a Welsh speaker but, acutely, she was a Welsh-hearer, and her poems seem to emerge from the rhythms of cynghanedd and englyn, like those of Hopkins and Dylan Thomas himself. Roberts, a more marginal figure, did not achieve the exposure that would familiarise readers with her voice, and so create the climate for her reception. This underserved neglect at least means that readers today can experience as new her quality of bracing, wet-ink freshness. She also writes with sensuous power about her South American past: The poem was probably written in April 1930. Among the subsequent small changes he records, Mendelson notes that in Auden’s lover Chester Kallman’s copy of Poems (1934), Auden revised the first line to “Your lunar beauty”, but that this change isn’t made in any further printings. The initials JC appear in Kallman’s copy: the identity of JC is unknown. From this verse on, environmental damage accumulates. Padel sums up the sad, complicated story of the collapse of the Gulf Stream’s system of warm ocean-currents in the anthropomorphism of “failing muscles”. The image gives animal form and activity to the water, and suggests how all animals, ourselves included, will suffer, and are suffering, as the ice caps melt and the sea levels rise. The next “slide” in the visual presentation sweeps us into the core of the Chacaltaya glacier. Bolivia’s only ski resort has already been destroyed: that big number which gives its age (“two-hundred-and-fifty- // million-year core”) is tidily contrasted in the mimetic final stanza, tracing the glacier’s final shrinkage to an area “now shingle / and a fossil-feather-memory / of ice.” Again, the image of a living creature, one that could fly and, at least metaphorically, leave a “fossil-feather memory” in the landscape which humans used and destroyed, adds an intimate dimension to vast geological process.

Anne Brontë had only a little longer than a decade left for her writing: she died of her tuberculosis at the age of 29. Her poems are included in the first Brontë book to be published, Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell – the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. Her two works of fiction are Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). The poet’s “sweet impudence” is apparent in the generally colloquial diction, but above all in his choice of double- or triple- word rhymes: “end go”/ “window”, “rude as you”/ “nude as you”. A joyful list of the sparrow’s faults in verse four is purposely unconvincing, especially when he repeats himself in “sweetly rude”. Observation and detachment, sympathy and distaste, forge the inner conflict the poem confronts in its last lines. “I want them gone. I want to be absolved” is a line hard and glittering in its frankness, and in depicting the incompatibility of the two desires. This is followed by an immediate shift to the niggling practicalities – “Shall I give some coins to each of them?” It is at the level of finding an answer to this kind of question, moral and pragmatic, that the urge to action begins to die of exhaustion: “If it were only one, or just one day … ”

The above poem was the second of fourteen by Tagore in the June 1913 issue of Poetry magazine. Tagore won the 1913 Nobel Prize for Literature, "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West". For Hannah Stone’s narrator, the second sleep is a haunt of deeper nightmare, and the dream she recounts evokes an involuntary dash at an uncontrollable and fatal pace. The “bruised psyche” is strapped on a hurdle, being dragged along by galloping horses driven by the dead. One of the definitions of “hurdle”, and the most relevant to this nightmare, is “a frame or sled formerly used in England for dragging traitors to execution”.