We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr
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who study early man, tell us that the rhythm and the music came first. Dances, perhaps led by tribal shamans, would be used to bind the people together and to express defiance of the surrounding dark and danger. To keep the beat, it was natural to hum, sing or shout. And at some point it seemed a good idea to add words. The earliest Greek tragedies, with their choruses, music and masks, give us some notion of where poetry came from.
The first poets that we know were read and discussed on the archipelago of islands we call British would have been the Latin poets of the Roman Empire. It’s most unlikely that the Bronze Age tribes – technically competent people, farmers and metalworkers, miners and traders – didn’t have their own poetry. But we know nothing about it. The Romano-British, however, would have had their Virgil and their Martial, and indeed their Greeks as well; there would have been poetry recitals in the villas of Sussex, and dirty, clever ditties murmured along Hadrian’s Wall.
Eventually, with the scouring of invasion and the countersweep of resistance, with defeats and victories, the ethnic make-up of the British changes, and we begin to see a new language emerging from the clash of the Germanic tongues of invaders, and the Celtic speech, by now mingled with Latin, of the resisters. Like a perpetual bubbling broth, new ingredients will be added again and again through the centuries – Norse Viking, French, Italian and Spanish, Indian and Arabic. This linguistic paella will become the world’s most extensive and flexible human tongue, used by generations of British people to express their strongest innermost feelings, their delight in the world, their loves and their terrors. Most human cultures seem to have specialities, for which they are particularly admired. What would Germany be without its music, or Italy without its painters and architects? The British have never had a musical tradition to rival that of Russia or Germany; or the gloriously exuberant architecture of Paris or Rome; or the coherent worldview of classical China. What they have had is the richest and most remarkable tradition of poetry of any major culture. The ‘nest of singing birds’ remains at the heart of the British achievement – more important, I’d say, than empire or even the extraordinary British leaps forward in science.
What follows is an attempt to use British poetry as the framework for a kind of alternative epic, the story of what it was like to be British, told through poetry, and sometimes through the stories of the poets.
Hundreds of thousands of Britons have left traces of what it was like to be ‘me in particular’ – letters, drawings, works of art of all kinds, text messages, emails and social-network exhibitionism. Yet poetry is special. It’s the most intimate and direct communication mankind has so far discovered. When it works – and quite often it doesn’t – it can have an intensity and an interiority unmatched by anything else. When Shakespeare describes the accumulated guilt and despair of the murderer Macbeth, we see and hear a mind working in a way that seizes us still in the twenty-first century. We can read about the catastrophe of the First World War; but to feel what it was like to be there, even now, we don’t turn first to the film-makers but to the poets. Those are rather obvious examples. But unlike texts, emails or television, poetry allows people from distant times to talk directly to us, with nobody else getting in the way: a medieval ploughman, a Tudor drunk or a jilted Georgian woman can look us straight in the eyes.
Writing this in 2015, I’m acutely conscious that the very word ‘British’ has become controversial. Many of my fellow Scots would far prefer an epic of the Scots in verse – and they can indeed find that. England, happily or otherwise, seems to be beginning to find its own voice again: many contemporary historians now focus unashamedly on the story of England, when perhaps even a decade or two ago they would have automatically reached for Britain.
If I restricted what follows to poetry written in English, however, I’d be in a quandary. The ‘Inglis’ tongue was established across much of southern Scotland by the early medieval period – even the patriotic epic about Robert the Bruce is written in a language which owes much more to the Saxon–French mangling we call English than to Gaelic. Scotland’s greatest poets – Dunbar, Henryson, Douglas, Fergusson, Burns, Scott and MacDiarmid – wrote at least sometimes in English; and when there was a determined attempt to return to the older Scottish versions of English in the twentieth century, the prickly ‘Scots’ that emerged was still a cousin of English. The same is true of the other Celtic nations: how could a survey of English poetry ignore Swift, Yeats and Dylan Thomas?
There is no political agenda in this book, though many of the experiences of the people across the archipelago have been similar. The Vikings arrived on the coasts of all of Britain, and settled in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, Dublin, the Isle of Man and the Gower Peninsula, as well as York and most of eastern England. The rage of the Reformation arrived in full force in Scotland, as well as England; plagues did not discriminate; nor changes in agriculture; nor many of the wars. So a lot of the British experience has been common, and I aim to reflect that. I also hope to include much that is specific to different parts of these islands.
And I have deliberately called this a ‘British’, not an ‘English’, epic, because I’m well aware that so much great poetry has been composed in other languages on these islands. There is a tradition of Gaelic poetry in Scotland, and Irish poetry in Ireland, and the work of the great Welsh bards. The fact that so much of this was transmitted orally, and lacks clarity about its authorship, doesn’t mean it should be excluded. So where I can, I’m going to use non-English British poetry in translation. I wish there was more of it; but that’s the fault of the rot and the rain, not mine. It also means that I will use translations where otherwise modern readers would struggle – thus, of Anglo-Saxon poetry, poetry in dialects from Cheshire to Northumbria, and a little Latin poetry too.
Some say poetry today, in the twenty-first century, is going through a revival; others insist that it’s in terminal decline. I suppose that has always been the case. But the very source of the problem is how we hear and absorb poetry. These days most of us come across poetry on the printed page, though many of us were brought up with nursery rhymes recited to us. The story of poetry and the story of writing are closely connected, but historically poetry has more often been an oral art, heard rather than read. Even today some poets refuse to print their work, but insist that it can only be enjoyed properly at a live reading. So radio, as the prime spoken-word medium, even today, is the obvious place for this epic. What you are reading is the longer, book-length version of the takeover of BBC Radio 4 for a whole day. Poetry is going to elbow itself into programmes like Today, refusing to take no for an answer. It’s going to lounge and sprawl between news and weather bulletins, with readings from around the whole country, and poems going back well over a thousand years in time.
This book includes some of the greatest of our poetry, including much that is far too little-known. I hope that it adds up to a new way of thinking about who we have been, and who we are now. I hope, as you come on the journey with me, you will find it surprising, uplifting, and at least a little disorientating.
1
It begins in Yorkshire, on the coast by Whitby, in the year 657. Peat-smoke, the sound of waves and gulls, and winding through them the music of a harp, and words chanted in a language and a dialect so far-away we can barely understand one of them.
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard,
Meotodes meahte on his modgeðanc,
weorc Wuldorfæder, swa he wundra gehwæs,
ece Drihten, or onstealde.
He ærest sceop eorþan bearnum
heofon to hrofe, halig Scyppend;
þa middangeard moncynnes Weard,
ece Drihten, æfter teode
firum foldan, Frea ælmihtig.
It’s a very simple little hymn, and the traditional starting point for English poetry. Later on, we’re going to hear a lot from the educated and self-confident elite of the British countries, poets from the great cities and the courts of barons and kings. But we start with