CityReads│Poems for City and Urban Life

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Poems for City and Urban Life

"Say this city has ten million souls,

Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:

Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us."

Wang Zuoliang. 2017. Appreciation and Evaluation of English Poems, Beijing: Joint Publishing (in Chinese).

I encountered a book, Appreciation and Evaluation of English Poems, by Wang Zuoliang. Poems for city and urban life caught my attention, which present interesting mirror images to the academic analysis. I select some of the poems on city and urban life. Enjoy.

Poems for urban landscape

The Whitsun Weddings

By Philip Larkin

Canals with floatings of industrial froth;   

…

Until the next town, new and nondescript,   

Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

Going, Going

By Philip Larkin

And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres.

Poems for urban life

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock  Launch Audio in a New Window

By T. S. Eliot

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

…

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

Les sylphides

By Louis MacNeice

So they were married-to be the more together-

And found they were never again so much together,

Divided by the morning tea,

By the evening paper,

By children and tradesmen‘s bills.

Waking at times in the night she found assurance

in his regular breathing but wondered whether

It was really worth it and where

The river had flowed away

And where were the white flowers.

Poems for refugees

By WH Auden

Say this city has ten million souls,

Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:

Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us.

Once we had a country and we thought it fair,

Look in the atlas and you'll find it there:

We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.

In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,

Every spring it blossoms anew:

Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that.

The consul banged the table and said,

"If you've got no passport you're officially dead":

But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;

Asked me politely to return next year:

But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;

"If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread":

He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.

Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;

It was Hitler over Europe, saying, "They must die":

O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.

Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,

Saw a door opened and a cat let in:

But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews.

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,

Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:

Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;

They had no politicians and sang at their ease:

They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,

A thousand windows and a thousand doors:

Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;

Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:

Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.  

Marxist poetry

Hugh MacDiarmid, a Scottish poet, journalist, essayist and political figure, claimed his poetry to be Marxist.

The greatest poets undergo a kind of crisis in their art,

A change proportionate to their previous achievement.

…

Fools regret my poetic change-from my “enchanting early lyrics”-

But I have found in Marxism all that I need-

And, above all, my poetry is Marxist.

Why I choose red

By Hugh MacDiarmid

I fight in red for the same reasons

That Garibaldi chose the red shirt

      -- Because a few men in a field wearing red

Look like many men  -- if there are ten you will think

There are a hundred; if a hundred

You will believe them a thousand.

And the colour of red dances in the enemy's rifle sights

And his aim will be bad – But, best reason of all,

A man in a red shirt can neither hide nor retreat.

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