Helena Bonham Carter, Tobias Menzies and Jamael Westman join Allie Esiri to read great poetry

welcome to the edinburgh international book festival we are here in the beautiful gardens of belcomport where i will be joined by helena bonham carter tobias menzies and jamel westman for the launch of a poem for every autumn day the first of a series of seasonal anthologies that i've curated for macmillan hosting an event packed full of poetry that distills and celebrates the autumnal months feels like a particularly fitting endeavor at this moment in time firstly and most obviously because we currently find ourselves standing at the threshold of seasonal change the blistering heat of summer beating on our backs in farewell the blustery cooling wind of autumn beckoning us forward but there is also something aptly analogous between autumn and our brave new pandemic stricken world after all both are defined by uncertainty constant flux and trepidation about what's yet to come both force people to retreat and become more cloistered away both plunge us into dark times in which light seems sometimes all too distant great poetry helps remind us that we're not the first nor the last to go through what we're feeling it enables us to share and communicate our joys and sorrows and allows us to escape into different worlds real and imagined when we need relief from our own all of this and to paraphrase emily dickinson it never asks a crumb of us in return in this vibrant and vital poem the victorian poet gerald manley hopkins recreates the overwhelming joy he felt on one particular autumnal straw and through the immediacy of his verse lets us share in his all for this bucolic harvest scene hopkins was a jesuit priest as well as a poet and there are clear religious overtones but these lines also offer a celebration of the unpredictable wild wonders of autumn [Music] summer ends now now barbarous in beauty the stooks arise around up above what wind walks what lovely behavior of silk sack clouds and has wilder willful wavier meal drift moulded ever melted across skies i walk i lift up i lift up heart eyes down all that glory in the heavens to glean our savior and eyes hard what looks what lips yet give you a rapturous love's greeting of reeler of rounder replies and the azirus hung hills are his world wielding shoulder majestic as a stallion stalwart very violet sweet these things these things were here and but the beholder wanting which two when they once meet the heart reared wings bold and bolder and hurls for him oh half hurls earth for him off under his feet [Music] this tender poem by the guyanese british poet john agard pays testament to the soothing power of the natural world when we encounter nothing but hostility and malice in our personal interactions here a young boy is prayed to the school bully who not only physically hurts him but perhaps worse humiliates and derides his feelings the child finds that words elude him he cannot articulate or share his pain with anyone except for the birds who are always there always listening not in an eerie hitchcockian way of course but in a comforting way that inspires the poor boy to soar above his cruel peers the her boy talked to the birds and fed them the crumbs of his heart was not easy to find the words for secrets he hid under his skin heart boy talked of a bully's fist that made his face a bruised moon his spectacles stamped to bloom it was not easy to find the words the things that nightly hissed as if his pillow was a hideaway for creepy crawlies the notes sent to the girl he fancied held high in mockery but the heartboy talked to the birds and their feathers gave him welcome their wings taught him new ways to become emily dickinson imbues these six lines with wisdom and philosophical considerations as she delivers a perfect riposte to those who argue that words fail to articulate the essence of thoughts and feelings or that poetry only has power when written on the page a word is dead when it is said some say i say it just begins to live that day 11th of september marks one of the gravest autumn days in recent history although that horrific era defining event is never explicitly mentioned in this poem by the pakistan-born british writer imtiaz dhaka the attacks that day in 2001 in america cast a long shadow over the text her main focus here is on the fallout born from the tragedy when a vengeful and confused public wanted someone to blame and began to show indiscriminate hostility towards middle eastern people and when the words freedom fighter and terrorist became highly contested labels outside the door lurking in the shadows is a terrorist is that the wrong description outside that door taking shelter in the shadows is a freedom fighter i haven't got this right outside waiting in the shadows is a hostile militant a word's no more than waving wavering flags outside your door watchful in the shadows is a gorilla warrior god i'll be outside defying every shadow stanza martyr i saw his face no words can help me now just outside the door lost in the shadows is a child who looks like mine one word for you outside my door his hand too steady his eyes too hard is a boy who looks like your son too i open the door come in i say come in and eat with us the child steps in and carefully at my door takes off his shoes in this next poem yorkshire poet ted hughes traces the autumnal transition from the dying days of summer to a cold and colorless winter through the journey of leaves although the text is shrouded by a funeral tone that occasionally verges even on the violent and visceral there's also something quite poignantly heartwarming about the way in which hughes personifies different elements of a pastoral landscape for while it is a poem about death it is also a poem about sisterhood in nature as everything from the sunset to the birds come together to grieve for the end of summer for autumn hughes quietly suggests is not just a time for mourning but a period of equilibrium renewal and restoration when the falling leaves nourish growing marrows and flowing rivers clear away the detritus who's killed the leaves me says the apple i've killed them all fat is a bomb or a cannonball i've killed the leaves who sees them drop me says the pair they will leave me all bare so all the people can point and stare i see them drop who catch their blood me me me says the marrow the marrow i'll get so rotund that they'll need a wheelbarrow i'll catch their blood we'll make their shroud me says the swallower there's just time enough before i must pack all my spools and be off i'll make their shroud who'll dig their grave me says the river with the power of the clouds a brown deep grave i'll dig under my floods i'll dig their grave will be their parson me says the crow for it is well known i studied the bible right down to the bone i'll be there parson who'll be there chief mourner me says the wind i will cry through the grass the people will pale and go cold when i pass i'll be chief mourner who'll carry the coffin me says the sunset the whole world will weep to see me lower it into the deep i'll carry the coffin we'll sing the song me says the tractor with my gear grinding glottal i'll plow up the stubble and sing through my throttle i'll sing the song all told the bell me says the robin my song in october will tell the still gardens the leaves are over i'll told the bell on the surface this piece by the american poet sylvia plath is a defense of the elegance of the helpless pheasant and a plea against the callousness of game shooting a favorite pastime of her husband ted hughes but knowledge of their tempestuous marriage and hughes's infidelities lends the poem a personal poignancy it's no longer a rebuke of hunting but an account of a wife's attempt to salvage her fragile sense of worth in the face of her husband's unthinking cruelty you said you would kill it this morning do not kill it it startles me still the jut of that odd dark head pacing through the uncut grass on the elms hill it is something to own a pheasant or just to be visited at all i'm not mystical it isn't as if i thought it had a spirit just simply in its element that gives it a kingliness a right the print of its big foot last winter the trail track on the snow in our court the wonder of it in that pallor through the cross hatch of sparrow and starling is it its rareness then it is rare but a dozen would be worth having a hundred on that hill red green crossing and recrossing a fine thing it is such a good shape so vivid it's a little cornucopia it unclaps brown as a leaf and loud settles in the elm and is easy it is it was sunning in the narcissistic i trespassed stupidly let me let be ted hughes wrote this poem in 1962 the same year that plath pens the pheasant here he presents himself not as the brutal shooter but as a tender and doting father it describes a moment of wonderment experienced by his and platt's infant daughter in the garden of their devon home frieda hughes the only surviving member of that family is now a successful poet and artist in her own right [Music] the cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket and you listening a spider's web tense for the deer's touch a pail lifted still and brimming mirror to tempt a first star to a tremor cows are going home in the lane there looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath a dark river of blood many boulders balancing unspilled milk moon you cry suddenly moon moon the moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work that points at him amazed the indian writer rabbi rinath tagore was the recipient of the nobel prize for literature in 1913 and was a noted artist and musician as well as a poet this next poem is about quietly attempting to make contact with the universe outside of yourself the paper boats themselves act like tagore's poems he does not know where they will travel nor what they will mean to his readers but in his dreams they take on a life of their own day by day i float my paper boats one by one down the running stream big black letters i write my name on them and the name of the village where i live i hope that someone in some strange land will find them and know who i am i load my little boats with chili flowers from our garden and hope that these blooms of the dawn will be carried safely to land in the night i launch my paper boat and look into the sky and see the little clouds setting their white bulging sails i know not what playmate of mine sends them down the air to race with my boats when night comes i bury my face in my arms and dream that my paper boats float on and on under the midnight stars the fairies of sleep are sailing in them and the lady is their baskets full of dreams the irish poet sheamus heaney's poem about his father and his grandfather at work digging ends as a reflection on his own craft he's not a skilled agriculturist but a writer and the poet has to reconcile with the fact that he is not his father nor his grandfather and he will go to do the work he knows best between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests snug as a gun under my window a clean rasping sound when the spade sinks into gravelly ground my father digging i looked down to his straining rump among the flower beds ben's low comes up 20 years away stooping in rhythm through potato drills where he was digging the coarse boot nestled on the lug the shaft against the inside knee was levered firmly he rooted out tall tops buried the bright edge deep to scatter new potatoes that we picked loving their cool hardness in our hands by god the old man could handle a spade just like his old man my grandfather cut more turf in a day than any other man on toner's bog once i carried him milk in a bottle caulked sloppily with paper he straightened up to drink it then fell to right away nicking and slicing neatly heaving sods over his shoulder going down and down for the good turf digging the cold smell of potato mold the squelch and slap of soggy pete the curt cuts of an edge through living roots awaken in my head but i have no spade to follow men like them between my finger and my thumb the squat pen rests i'll dig with it this short poem dates back to medieval times when the printed book had only just appeared poems would have been sung or chanted and passed down the generations through an oral tradition we can revive that here [Music] western wind when will thou blow the small rhine down come bright christ if me love were in the arms and die in bed again [Music] western wind [Music] the small ring down come right christ stiff me lord [Music] despite being welcomed with open arms to the pantheon of all-time greats much of elizabeth bishop's poetry plots a struggle to find a sense of belonging and is marked by an underlying sense of loss and alienation this poem written to her female friend and object of her affection is powerful in its expression of loss anxiety and longing in your next letter i wish you'd say where you are going and what you were doing how are the plays and after the plays what other pleasures you're pursuing taking cabs in the middle of the night driving as if to save your soul where the road goes round and round the park and the meter glares like a mortal owl and the trees look so queer and green standing alone in the big black caves and suddenly you're in a different place where everything seems to happen in waves and most of the jokes you just can't catch like dirty words rubbed off a slate and the songs are loud but somehow dim and it gets so terribly late and coming out of the brownstone house to the gray sidewalk the watered street one side of the buildings rises with the sun like a glistening field of wheat wheat not oats i'm afraid if it's wheat it's none of your sewing nevertheless i'd like to know what you were doing and where you're going and this humbling reflection on the transients of all human endeavors shelley describes how even ostensibly monolithic dynasties are inevitably laid waste by time having died in 1822 at the age of just 29 shelley's legacy as a writer remains as one of a young contrarian firebrand deeply skeptical and critical of the systems of power control and colonization and while the sonnet could be read simply as a fatalistic acceptance that nothing endures it also puts forward a faith in time as the great leveler and serves to console us that all regimes and despots will meet an unceremonious end i met a traveller from an antique land who said two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert near them on the sand half sunker shattered visage lies whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that it sculpt a well those passions read which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed and on the pedestal these words appear my name is ozymandias king of kings look on my works ye mighty and despair nothing beside remains round the decay of these colossal wreck boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away [Music] this next poem by stevie smith was published in 1957. in an interview about the poem she explained that it was about how many people pretend out of bravery that they are very jolly and ordinary sort of chaps when actually they find life to be a struggle they're not waving but drowning as the days get shorter and nights darker and more enveloping throughout autumn it's easy to find one's mood plummet here it's as if smith is calling on us to look out for our friends whose cheerful personas may belie some personal troubles nobody heard him the dead man but still he lay moaning i was much further out than you thought and not waving but drowning poor chap he always loved laughing now he's dead it must have been too cold for him for his heart gave way they said oh no no no it was too cold always still the dead one they moaning i was much too far out all my life and not waving but drowning [Music] yates wrote this poem for maud gone the irish actress suffragette and revolutionary activist who was a frequent muse of his and the object of no fewer than four proposals by the poet it's a beautifully heart-rending piece of verse in which the poet emphasizes that his love transcends mere physical considerations and will endure unwavering when you are old and gray and full of sleep and nodding by the fire take down this book and slowly read and dream of the soft look your eyes had once and of their shadows deep how many loved your moments of glad grace and loved your beauty with love false or true but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you and loved the sorrows of your changing face and bending down beside the glowing bars murmur a little sadly how love fled and paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars the late 19th century and 20th century poet a houseman said that the business of poetry is to harmonize the sadness of the universe houseman suffered a particular sadness when at oxford he fell deeply in love with his roommate moses jackson and was so distracted by his grief that he failed his finals this poem was published in his 1896 book a shropshire lad unlike many of the poems in the collection it is narrated by a speaker looking back on his youth whereas ozymandias looks at the gradual rise and fall of empires over epochs housman's poem reminds us that a year can feel like a very long significant time especially in early adulthood when i was 1 in 20 i heard a wise man say give crowns and pounds and guineas but not your art away give pearls away and rubies but keep your fancy free but i was 1 and 20. now you used to talk to me when i was 1 and 20 i heard him say again the art out of the bosom is never given in vain it is paid with size aplenty and sold for endless rule and i am 2 and 20. i know it is true it is true written in 1940 this poem expresses the anxieties of a world in the midst of being plunged into another devastating war the refrain of if i could tell you i would let you know betrays a certain desperate search for some tangible assurances and explanations but there is perhaps also a sense of comfort from the fact that in a life of fluctuations time remains the only constant [Music] time will say nothing but i told you so time only knows the price we have to pay if i could tell you i would let you know if we should weep and clowns put on their show if we should stumble when musicians play time will say nothing but i told you so there are no fortunes to be told although because i love you more than i can say if i could tell you i would let you know the winds must come from somewhere when they blow there must be reason why the leaves decay the time will say nothing but i told you so perhaps the roses really want to grow the vision seriously intends to stay if i could tell you i would let you know suppose the lions all get up and go and the brooks and soldiers run away will time say nothing but i told you so if i could tell you i would let you know these next two works by the american modernist poet william carlos williams are the perfect example of imagist poems taking as their focal point a single snapshot of life i've eaten the plums that were in the icebox that you were probably saving for breakfast to give me they were so delicious so sweet so cold [Music] so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens there's no white chickens well i was slightly jealous of them all being outside so i come out now for this next poem which in it it almost sounds as if the 13th century persian poet rumi is telling his readers to embrace dark thoughts shame and malice but what he's really saying is to invite them in even if they appear to be disagreeable or upsetting the worst thing to do is to ignore your feelings you never know if they might turn out to be significant and illuminating in the future in ways that might escape you in the present this being human is a guest house every morning a new arrival a joy a depression a meanness some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor welcome and entertain them all even if they are a crowd of sorrows violently sweep your house empty of its furniture still treat each guest honorably he may be clearing you out for some new delight the dark thought the shame the matters meet them at the door laughing and invite them in be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond born in saint lucia derek walcott ranks among the finest of caribbean poets his writings earned him the nobel prize for literature in 1992. this poem is about learning to love yourself at the end of a relationship if stevie smith asks us to look out for others in not waving but drowning then wolcott is imploring us to take care of ourselves just as we would take care of our friends the time will come when with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door in your own mirror and each will smile at the others welcome and say sit here eat you will love again the stranger who was yourself give wine give bread give back your heart to itself to the stranger who has loved you all your life whom you ignored for another who knows you by heart take down the love letters from the bookshelf the photographs the desperate notes peel your own image from the mirror sit feast on your life our final poem today is also the final poem of a poem for every autumn day here the colors of nature fade as winter approaches and nothing can stop the passing of time but while it's true that nothing can remain forever it doesn't mean that the wonderful golden hues of autumn don't return every year winter may seem dark and forbidding but it won't be long before we're hararing in harvest once again nature's first green is gold her hardest hue to hold her early leafs of flower but only so an hour and then leaf subsides to leaf so eden sank to grief so dawn goes down today i think gold can stay [Music] do [Music] you

Channel: Poetry Corner with Allie Esiri

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Keywords: Helena Bonham Carter, Tobias Menzies Jamael Westman Allie Esiri, poetry, autumn, poem, school, english, theatre, film, television, the crown, hamilton, harry potter, outlander, sonnet, actor, moviestar, emmy, bafta, oscar

Id: 68ScpohzSuU

Length: 35min 2sec (2102 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020