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- [00:01]
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- [01:03]
Lauren Good
Ugh.
- [01:04]
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- [01:21]
Catherine Clarke
Hey, still got my hoodie?
- [01:22]
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- [01:34]
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- [01:42]
Catherine Clarke
I wanted to give something to the
- [01:44]
Progressive Insurance Announcer
fans that they didn't expect. The only thing left is to close the book.
- [01:47]
Expedia and Celsius Advertiser
The end of an era. And don't miss Taylor Swift. The Eras Tour, the final show featuring for the first time the Torture poets department. Streaming December 12th only on Disney.
- [02:08]
History Extra Podcast Narrator
How do you tell the story of 1,300 years of English history? Through verse, according to cultural historian Catherine Clarke? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, she takes Lauren Good on a poetic journey through time, from the Black Death to literal bum fodder. Along the way, they explore why we've got WH Auden's funeral blues all wrong, how Elizabeth Barrett Browning used poetry as a platform for social change, and how such works offer uniquely human insights into key moments in history.
- [02:43]
Lauren Good
Hi Katharine. Thank you so much for joining me today.
- [02:46]
History Extra Podcast Narrator
Hi.
- [02:46]
Catherine Clarke
Good to be here.
- [02:47]
Lauren Good
Your book, A History of England in 25 poems, does what it says on the tin. It covers the history of England from the 8th century to the present day in 25 poems. Now, Catherine, quite an undertaking. When did you think, you know what? I'm going to summarise England's history in this way?
- [03:05]
Catherine Clarke
I think poems have a real magic for taking us, like time machines, inside moments in the past, because. And these are poems written between the 8th century and the present day. So they cover 1300 years of England's history. And that magic of poetry is that it takes us into the events of history, you know, the landmark events, the milestones. So in the book, there's the Battle of Agincourt, world wars, the Great Fire of London. But crucially, poems also take us inside the feelings, the imaginations, the experiences of people living and breathing through history. So that, I think, is the magic, telling sometimes familiar stories of England's history, sometimes uncovering really surprising new stories, but taking us right inside. And the other thing, I think, is that poetry can allow us to connect with familiar voices and perspectives, but also some much less well known voices and perspectives, and sometimes those stories that have been marginalized or silenced in the archive.
- [04:04]
Lauren Good
I love this idea of poetry acting as a time machine. I think we're quite ready to dismiss fiction, aren't we, as simply fiction? But it does tell us a lot about the more intimate side of history.
- [04:16]
Catherine Clarke
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The idea of the time machine, you know, was really kind of central to my conceptualization of the book. And I think each chapter, you know, begins with a poem and that sort of opens a door, opens a portal, if you like. And each chapter is a sort of immersive adventure in time travel into a moment in the past. And there was one moment that particularly inspired that idea of time travel through poetry for me, when I was handling a 17th century printed book in the library. And as I looked through it, it was a collection of royalist satirical poetry against the English Republic. In the last section of the book, there was a wormhole burrowed through the pages, a literal wormhole, where the lava of some insect had munched its way through the pages. And I held it up and I peeped through, avoiding contact with the Special Collections librarian. And that just made me think, you know, aren't books always a kind of wormhole themselves that can transport us somewhere else in space and crucially, in time? And I think poems can be that very powerful, particular kind of wormhole that take us right inside a moment in the past.
- [05:22]
Lauren Good
How did you go about narrowing it down to the 25 poems in the book?
- [05:27]
Catherine Clarke
It was a fun experiment, you know, is it possible to tell all those centuries of history, all that kind of colourful, contested, complicated history of England in just 25 poems. And each poem, as I said, starts a chapter and each chapter reaches out further. But it was great Fun choosing the 25. And I had a few guiding principles. I wanted the poems to take us right across the country, so different parts of England, obviously right across time. So we start in so called dark age Northumbria. And the most recent poem was published in 2022. But also, as I already hinted at, I think I wanted that range of different voice allowing us to discover new ways into England's history. So there were poems by men and by women, by people of very different social status and class, voices of colour. There's even a poem in the book written by a child, so written by Lewis Carroll, but when he was still Charles Dodgson, when he was 13 years old, he wrote a poem to entertain his younger siblings. And you know, that's a great example of the kind of voice, a child's voice, that often isn't there in big sweep tellings of England's history. So it's really about that diversity about familiar poems that we know and love. You know, Adelstrop is in there, a poem that I think is cherished by many of us, but also much less familiar poems that I think people will enjoy discovering.
- [06:53]
Lauren Good
Now, unfortunately, we won't have time to get through all 25 today. People will have to read the book for the rest. So I've chosen a small selection. Can we start with the poem Pearl? It's written around 1390 and it explores the love and loss during the time of the Black Death. But first of all, what is this poem about on the surface?
- [07:15]
Catherine Clarke
So that's actually a really tricky question, Lauren, because it is such a complicated poem. It's a dream poem. So it's a poem about somebody's dream telling the story of a dream. And as we know, you know, dreams can be strange and hallucinatory and shape shifting and things aren't always what they seem. And at the beginning of the poem we have what seems to be a jeweler grieving because he once had the most precious, beautiful pearl that he ever held. And it's lost, alas. And he talks about it sort of rolling away from him into the grass and into the earth. But it becomes apparent really quickly that the pearl isn't just a pearl, that it's a metaphor and that the dreamer who's speaking, he's speaking in the role of a jeweler, but he's also speaking as a father. And this exquisite, beautiful pearl, the most beautiful thing that he ever held and that he's lost and it's so heartbreaking is his little daughter who's died and is buried. So the poem is a vision that comes to the dreamer as he lays down grieving in this beautiful garden where he lost his pearl. He lies down on the grass to sleep and he has a vision. And across a shining river he sees a figure. He doesn't recognize her at first, but it's his daughter now in heaven, in the kingdom of heaven. And she tells him about this life, this kingdom beyond the world. But it's a tricky poem. It's full of complicated, as I said, kind of shape shifting dream imagery. But at its heart is this incredibly powerful story of love and of loss and grief. And it gives us a new and incredibly powerful and emotionally affecting way into that big story of, as you say, the Black death in the 14th century.
- [09:06]
Lauren Good
It is such a big story. And I think we often focus on the shocking statistics during these times of devastation. But as you've touched on poems like Pearl, they give us a more human, emotional view of these events, don't they?
- [09:19]
Catherine Clarke
Yeah, absolutely. So we probably all, you know, touched on the Black Death at school or we all have some understanding of it. You know, the statistics are mind Bogg to 60% of the population killed by the Black Death. But of course, we've lived through COVID 19, we've lived through a global pandemic ourselves. And we know that those statistics don't tell the full human story of a pandemic. And I think that again, that's the magic of poetry. So it can kind of play with scale. We have this huge historical story that I'm exploring in this chapter of the book, but we find our way in at the most intimate scale. And it's that intimacy, I think, of poetry. And this is such a different world. You know, the way that the dreamer thinks and imagines is in some ways fascinatingly alluringly strange and alien from our way of thinking. But that grief of a father for his little daughter that is still as powerful today as it was then. It connects with us across time. And I suppose one of the things I find really fascinating in that story is the simultaneous immediacy and directness and familiarity of that moment at the end of the 14th century, and also its strangeness. So the language that the dreamer uses to describe his emotions, for example, on one level, what could be more relatable than the depth of a parent's Love for their child. But some of the language that he uses is really strange. So he talks about his grief kind of swelling and bursting in his breast, and that relates to, you know, very early medieval medical ideas about the mind, that it was this kind of hydraulic container in the chest that would swell with liquid when you were experiencing some form of kind of passion or emotion. And he talks about his unrequited love, essentially, for this daughter that he can't be with anymore. He uses the word louf. Danger, love, danger. And this is language from medieval courtly love and romance tradition. It's sort of an erotic concept, the love danger of love that can't be requited. And that seems so strange to us to use to borrow erotic language for a parent, child relationship. So there is real strangeness and alterity, but fundamentally, that incredibly powerful, relatable story.
- [11:42]
Lauren Good
There are so many tantalizing elements here. There's so much going on. And it's a really long poem as well, isn't it? But something that really interested me is that you said there are clues about the location of this writer as well, in the dialect.
- [11:57]
Catherine Clarke
Yeah. One of the wonderful things about this poem is that through the lapse and the dialect it's written in, we can trace its origins. So it seems to have been written somewhere in the Northwest Midlands towards the end of the 14th century. We might be thinking kind of Staffordshire, Cheshire, that sort of part of the world. So on the page, the language looks really quite different from modern English and also very different from Chaucer's English, which isn't far away in time. And there's a bit of Chaucer's incredibly colourful Wife of Bath's Tale in the book as well. That looks a little bit more familiar because that was London English, which is the forerunner of today's Standard English, down to all kinds of political accidents and chances of fate that I won't go into. But this poem, I think that's another aspect of that sense of immediacy and connection, that we can hear the voice of someone speaking from the Northwest Midlands. And it's very rooted in that kind of local, regional language. There are a lot more words borrowed from Old English in the poem. It's written, we think, by the same poet who wrote Gawain and the Green Knight. So instead of the word man, we might get, you know, folk, we might get dialect and regional and older words that are still being used in the Northwest Midlands. And, of course, thinking about the location and the place where the poem was written has also fed into lots of critical detective work about who the poem might have been written for. Was it written for a particular patron? Was there a particular young girl who died of the plague? And sometimes scholars have looked for medieval girls and young women called Margaret, related to the Latin word for the pearl. But the jury is still very much out, and I think the poem is deliberately written so that it's not tied to one specific story and that whoever you are, and I think just as much today as then, you can relate to it and you can maybe see something of yourself and your own experiences in the poem.
- [13:55]
History Extra Podcast Narrator
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- [14:45]
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- [15:37]
Lauren Good
You said that you cover a very diverse range of poems in this book. We're going to move forward now to the early 1660s and to a very different feeling poem Bum Fodder, which satirizes the Rump Parliament. Catherine what exactly was the Rump Parliament?
- [15:54]
Catherine Clarke
Again? This is a really tricky question, Lauren. So the Rump Parliament was essentially those members of Parliament who were left after Pride's purge in 1648, so the purge of all those members of Parliament who were opposed to the execution of Charles I. But the Parliament goes through many different iterations across that period of the Civil wars and the English Republic, the interregnum, it's constantly being booted out, brought back in. Members are leaving, and by this moment in early 16th, it is really on its last legs. As I say in the book, taking my inspiration from the scatological humour of the poem, it's the arse end of the Rump Parliament. So it's the dregs, it's the tail end. And when this poem, Bumfodder, is written, it seems that it really might be the last days of the hugely unpopular ineffectual rump Parliament, and that for the royalist writer of this poem, the restoration of the monarchy might finally be in sight.
- [16:57]
Lauren Good
As you said, it really doesn't shy away from scatological humour, and I think it's commonly thought that toilet humour is more of a modern thing, but this really disproves that, doesn't it?
- [17:06]
Catherine Clarke
I've got to say, Lauren, the earliest instance of farting in my book goes back to the 13th century and the medieval song Summariz are coming in. So, yeah, it goes right back. And, yeah, the full title of Bumfodder is Bum Fodder and it's to wipe the nation's rump with. So to give the rump Parliament a wipe, a good kicking, or your own. So it's 21 stanzas of pure hilarious scatology. So bum poo and fart jokes, and it's taking the Rump Parliament as its cue for that. But there's also another reason, I think, why the poem is so hilariously fixated on bums and toilets and toilet humour. And the clue there is in the title Bum Fodder, because this is not highbrow elite or courtly poetry. This is the poetry of the street. It's a broadside ballad. And these were the popular culture of their day. If you had a penny in your purse in early modern London, you might be able to get a small loaf of bread, a beer or a broadside ballad. You didn't even need to be literate to enjoy a broadside ballad. You could enjoy kind of owning the material object of the piece of paper, the rag itself, but you could listen to it, you could learn. They were kind of like the viral mem of their moment. In early modern towns and cities, millions of them were produced, but not that many survive. And there's a good reason for that. So they're called rags because early modern paper was made out of rags and many broadsides were read, enjoyed and then put to good use in the privy, where they did wipe the bums of early modern London. So the title of this poem, Bumfodder Bum Fodder, is what you wipe your bum with. If you've ever complained about. I know I do sometimes a load of bumf through the letterbox. Things that, you know, you don't really want. We're using that expression, you know, we're saying we might as well use it to wipe with. And that's the joke of this poem. It's gonna wipe Parliament's arse, but you might well use it to wipe your own and then drop it down the privy when you're done.
- [19:10]
Lauren Good
It's an incredible idea that poetry was, you know, enjoyed by the masses, but also served a very real purpose in people'.
- [19:21]
Catherine Clarke
Yeah, it's hilarious, isn't it? And, you know, by all accounts, I haven't tried this with any, you know, wonderful archival survivals, but by all accounts, it would do a great job because, you know, made out of scraps of rag, it would rival today's luxury toilet tissue for comfort. But, you know, that explains why so many broadside ballad sheets no longer survive. But it is the poetry of the street. And the poem is really leaning in to all the scatological potential of thinking about the Rum Parliament. It's the only poem I think you'll ever read that rhymes Magna Charta with Magna Fata. It's just this kind of torrent of scatological humour. It also plays with one of the other ways that image of the rump and the Rump Parliament was used, which is, you know, like a rotten old rump of meat that's hung too long on the butcher's hook. It jokes about hemorrhoids that these ineffectual members of the Rump Parliament have, you know, sat there too long. They're not doing any good. You know, they've all got piles, you know, has a lot of fun with this. So we know from Samuel Pepys diary that when the restoration of the monarchy was in sight, when the Rump Parliament was finally expelled, Londoners are out in the streets roasting rumps of meat on bonfires. And so kind of leaning in to that imagery of the Rump Parliament. And we also know that Samuel Pepys got together with some friends and he was singing a ballad to the tune that we know Bumfodder was sung to. So I love the idea that maybe Pepys and his mates were gathered together in a room singing these scatological verses together.
- [20:55]
Lauren Good
Now, the surviving copy that you reference is pretty rare because, as you said, a lot of these broadsheets were used as the equivalent of loo roll, I suppose. But you mentioned it in the intro that it was in this copy that we see the tiny hole working through the pages.
- [21:10]
Catherine Clarke
Yeah. So it's quite a strange journey that this broadside ballad that thought it was going to end up dropped down the privy has been on. So some copies do survive of it in its original broadside form. So just a sheet of early modern paper. But the copy that used was bound in a gorgeous book, Rump Songs. It's a collection of royalist poetry satirising the ill fated English republic that was collected together by Alexander Broom in 1662. And sometimes Bumford of the poem is attributed to him. And, you know, that is fascinating because it's a beautiful little book. It's gold, tooled, got a beautiful engraved frontispiece and, you know, really, who knew that this disposable, you know, fish and chip wrap newspaper rag that might have dropped down the privy would find longevity in this gorgeous book. And actually that it would be picked as one of my 25 poems telling the story of England. But yes, it was reading this poem that had the encounter with the wormhole that really just gave me that idea of poems as a portal, as a way into time, travel into the past.
- [22:19]
Lauren Good
The next poem or portal I'd love to discuss is very different. Again, we're moving to the mid 19th century to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's the Cry of the Children. What event was this written in response to?
- [22:33]
Catherine Clarke
Yeah, so it was written in response to kind of a series really of historical events, possibly kind of most prominently a terrible mining disaster in a coal mine in 1838, the Husker pit disaster. And this took place near Barnsley in South Yorkshire. It was the summer and there was a freak summer rainstorm. You know, those really, really exceptionally heavy summer rainstorms that sometimes happen. It was in all the local papers there, terrible damage. It talked about people taking shelter. A local man was struck by lightning and unable to speak for a day or two after the event. But the real tragedy that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is responding to was in husker pit where 26 children were trapped in a drift tunnel. So a tunnel leading up to the surface by the rushing water. They were pinned against a trapdoor and they were drowned, all 26 of them. The youngest of those children was just 7 years old. They were children who were at the brutal end of the Victorian Industrial Revolution. They were working down the mines. That was their job. Now, that event was a trigger for public outrage nationally, for a renewed sense that something had to be done about the brutal use of children's labour in mines and in factories. And there was a Royal commission, a government commission published on the employment of children and very young people in mines and factories, and that published just slightly later. And that's what Elizabeth Barrett Browning is also responding to in this poem, the Cry of the Children. And what she did in writing this poem, she worked through the evidence and the testimony in this government report. And from that she imagined the children themselves, kind of imagined voices of nameless children. She imagined them speaking about their labour, about their suffering, about their experience of working in mines and factories.
- [24:41]
Lauren Good
You spoke about the broadsides being spread across the lower classes. You know, in this time we do see this, you know, spreading awareness and encouraging change. What sort of change did follow the poem's publication?
- [24:57]
Catherine Clarke
Yeah, so I think that's a really important thing to highlight, Lauren. And I think, you know, Pat, perhaps today, Elizabeth Barrett Browning would be, I don't know, you know, trying to get a hashtag started on social media. You know, it is absolutely about awareness, visibility, about changing minds. And I think for us today, her poem the Cry of the Children, you know, it begins with weeping children. They talk about, you know, they can't tell the difference between flowers and weeds. For us, I think it feels very sentimental, almost quite mawkish. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning knew who she was writing for. She was writing for a middle class Victorian. And this, of course, is the moment when, you know, that middle class idea of the child is being invented. You know, I already mentioned briefly the poem written by Lewis Carroll when he was a child, which sits next to this one in the book and it includes instructions to children. It's called Rules and Regulations. And one of those instructions is believe in fairies. That idea of the innocent child is being invented, but only for those children, only for those middle class children who have that luxury. The children working down mines and in factories and subjected to these terrible experiences, they don't have that same privilege. And I think Barrett Browning, she was riding a wave. There was already a sense of public outrage at the labor of children in mines and factories and she was amplifying that. So what we see later and through the 19th century is this succession of laws raising the age for children's employment and also raising the age that children had to stay in school until, you know, by the end of the 19th century, you know, most children are in school until they go out to work. So there is this major change. And her poem did make a difference. It wasn't without some negativity in its reception. Even some of her contemporary readers had some problems with its sentimentality, but it made change.
- [26:56]
Lauren Good
I really wanted to touch on that criticism because. Because, as you've said, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was from a very comfortable background and she is writing very intimately about the working class experience.
- [27:08]
Catherine Clarke
Yeah, I mean, it's a real dilemma there, I think. So, you know, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's personal experience did not encompass this. And that's something that I examine quite closely in the book chapter. I turn, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning did, to the testimony in that government commission in that report, which is incredibly powerful. A seven year old child talking about, you know, I used to find it hard to stay awake down the mine, but now I smoke my pipe and I manage. Or an interview with one child who talks about surviving a terrible accident, being burned, and there's just a parenthesis afterwards that says, face quite badly disfigured, you know, terrible, terrible detail. But Elizabeth Barrett Browning transposes that into this quite lyrical, sentimental, you know, cry of the weeping children. And an early reviewer said, elizabeth Barrett Browning has written in poetry, we mean here to speak in prose. And he says, no, it is not always good when the children die before their time, picking up on her phrase in the poem. And he instead spells out the reality of what it might really mean to be caught up in a factory machine and pulled apart, or, you know, the terrible things that really could happen to children. So even in its moment, there was some discomfort, some objection with the way that she transposes the real the factory, the mine, the testimony in this report, into a beautiful, moving poem. But again, you know, I just want to emphasise she knew her audience, she knew what would connect with them, and her poem helped to make a difference. It's always complicated for me. It's the way that Barrett Browning's poem, it connects with us imaginatively and emotionally. But then it takes us back into the archival evidence around the Husker Pit disaster. It takes us back into those testimonies spoken by children. It takes us back into the reality, you know, in the early newspaper coverage of the Husker Pit disaster, one of the things that really lodged with me, that made a huge impact on me, when it lists the children who died, their ages are given and the age of one of the children is given as nine and a half. And I just find that so powerful? Because doesn't it speak of that kind of the precision when a child gives their age or when a parent speaks the age of their children? Nine and a half. These were little children, but, you know, living through these, these terrible experiences and not always living through Catherine.
- [29:34]
Lauren Good
The fourth and final poem I'd love to cover is Funeral Blues by W.H. auden. I'm sure listeners will recognize it from the opening line, stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone. It's so recognisable to so many now. It's one of the best known poems referenced during times of grief. But you say in the book that it was actually originally written for an entirely.
- [29:57]
Catherine Clarke
So this poem does have a backstory that I think will really surprise many people. So as you say, Lauren, it's such a loved and cherished and treasured poem. I think, you know, lots of us remember it from Four Weddings and a Funeral, where John Hannah, the actor, you know, reads that poem. You know, incredibly moving, but the first, the original version of this poem was written by W.H. auden for a play that he co wrote with Christopher Isherwood called the ascent of FC in 1936. And this is a play about the climbing of a fictitious mountain, F6. And it's this kind of heroic imperialist endeavour where a great man, a great mountaineer, Ransom, is sent to be the first to make the ascent of this mountain. And it's, you know, it's explicitly about empire and about power. You know, they want an Englishman to be the first to climb this mountain. It's in fictional pseudo land, in British Pseudo, not Osnian, pseudo land. And they want an Englishman, a Brit, to climb it before an Osnian Pseudolander. And in the story, in the play, Ransom agrees to go on this expedition. He's warned by local people in Pseudoland that a demon lives at the top of the mountain. And he's very dismissive. He dismisses this as, you know, primitive native superstition. It's very much within this imperialist mindset. But as he climbs the mountain, his companions die one by one, and he begins to accept the existence of the demon. When he gets to the top of the mountain, he meets the demon who's in the form of his mother because it's all a bit Freudian. And so, you know, he accepts its existence, but he dies. And in the play, the poem Stop all the Clocks is performed to commemorate the passing of this great hero, Ransom, to celebrate his heroism. It starts off with the same two verses that we're all familiar with, but Then it turns into something comic and ludicrous and exaggerated and ridiculous. And it's staged, the whole poem in the play in a scene of clowning around. So the speakers, the stage directions, say that they're both trying to be heard over each other. They're clambering on each other's shoulders and behaving in general. General like the Marx brothers, it says. So what's really fascinating is that this is a poem that was written as viscerally satirical comedy, a satire on the cult of the great man, on the idea of patriotic public mourning. But over time, it has changed. Auden did some rewriting, and then we've experienced it in different ways culturally, and now we know and love it as this powerful, sincere expression of personal grief.
- [32:55]
Lauren Good
You mentioned that it was used in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and that Faber even released a new Orlean anthology in response to this. Was that the moment where it entered public consciousness as a poem used for funerals, or had it already been used in that context before?
- [33:11]
Catherine Clarke
I think it had been used in that context before. So, first of all, Auden is reworking the poem as early as 1937. So, actually, one of the materials I was really lucky to work with in the archive as I was researching this book, was a letter that Auden wrote to a schoolteacher at that time, a Ms. Boyd. She'd written to him saying what kind of modern poetry can be of interest to schoolchildren? And he writes back this really brilliant letter saying, well, I'm afraid that what poets are interested in aren't, as a rule, what school children enjoy. And then he goes through his poems. It's brilliant, kind of listing ones that could be suitable. There's a category of easy but perhaps not clean enough, and then clean, but perhaps too difficult. And then he sends her this early draft, this early autograph copy of the new version of Stop all the Clocks, and says, I'm working on this at the moment. So he reworked the poem to be a standalone cabaret song, so to have meaning outside of the narrative of the play. And that's where it starts to make this journey, to be a personal expression of grief. When he switches in the verses that we know, you know, he was my north, my south, south, my east, my west, my working week, all those, the my. It becomes something very personal. But the poem has been well known and loved long before Four Weddings and a Funeral. It was used in the commemoration of the Heysel Stadium disaster. So it's a poem that we've looked to for comfort and consolation in Many personal and more public, difficult moments and moments of grief. But I think what's so fascinating is actually if you look at those first two verses of the poem, poem, you can actually see the traces of that very satirical origin. You know, stop the dog from barking with a juicy bone, or, you know, put black collars on the necks of the public doves, you know, let the traffic policeman wear black gloves. These are not the kind of timeless elegiac images of mourning and grief and poetry. They're really anchored in a kind of urban, suburban modernity. You know, in a way they're a bit kind of naffy, but also they're about public, municipal spectacle, they're about staged pageantry, they're about the civic, they're crucially about the public or the political co opting personal, private feeling, turning it into this staged show of proper emotion. And you know, the world that Auden is writing in got the rising cult of the great man. You've got Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Mussolini, these great, adored, dangerous, great men rising and being admired. And you also have, through totalitarian regimes, you have the co opting the mobilization, the managing, the manipulation of private feeling for public ends. So we can see that in the poem. And I think the amazing trick in the poem that we know and love today is that Auden is saying something really about when we're grieving. In a way you kind of wish you could stop everything, stop all the clocks in a way. Why can't the traffic all be stopped? Why can't your grief be written in the sky for everyone to see? It feels such an affront, it feels so ridiculous that the world should carry on. In a way, we've all had that sense of our grief being a great dictator, wanting to just stop the world in its tracks. And so as a metaphor, then connecting in the later verses with that very intimate, personal expression of grief, it works, it speaks to us.
- [36:42]
Lauren Good
Are there any other examples that come to mind of poems that have begun as one thing and evolved into something completely different in how we use or understand them today?
- [36:54]
Catherine Clarke
So one example that I would point to that begins one of the chapters in the book. And I, I think it's such an iconic, such a touchstone poem today is John of Gaunt's speech from Shakespeare's Richard ii. So obviously this is an excerpt from a play, a Shakespeare play. But very quickly, within that first century of its existence, it's being excerpted, it's being put into anthologies, it's being treated as a poem in its own right. So this is the, this England, this scepter dial, those words, those verses that are so often mobilised when we're celebrating England and England, Englishness. And they have been on, my goodness, quite a journey because, of course, John of Gaunt's deathbed speech in Richard ii, it's not a celebration of England. He uses that panegyric, that praising imagery of England, but he says, but now, now it's corrupt, now it's at risk of collapse, now it's falling apart. So those words that are so often used, used to voice patriotism, they're sometimes used in quite jingoistic contexts. That's not what they mean originally. This other Eden, this scepter dial, this precious jewel set in a silver sea, all of this, it's. But England's falling apart, it's collapsing, it's corrupt. It's not that it hath made a shameful conquest of itself. So that is a really interesting example of a poem. It was slippery to start with, of course, because England, England is not and never has been a sceptered isle. You know, it's a text that elides the existence of Scotland and Wales within the island and lets England kind of expand to fill the whole of that geography, as if it's kind of predestined and perfect. But that poem is one that is used very often to celebrate England. It's used still sometimes to critique, to be a voice of dissent and caution and admonishment as well. So a great example of how poems can start off as one thing and one historical moment and be used in other ways.
- [38:55]
Lauren Good
Finally, Catherine, you've referenced this all the way through our conversation, but I would love your closing line on it. Why should we pay more attention to poetry as a lens through which to view history?
- [39:09]
Catherine Clarke
So poetry takes us inside moments in the past. So in my book, it helps me find new ways in to the sources, the evidence, to those stories of history. But it lets us connect with the feelings, the imaginations of people living through the past. I think it's about not just understanding history, but feeling history too. And at the heart of this, for me, is the astonishing kind of empathy and intimacy that it allows for us. So we might read the history books about the Black Death, or about the Great War, or about crisis of faith and science in the 19th century. But by reading the poetry, we can get inside what it really felt like to be there.
- [39:56]
History Extra Podcast Narrator
That was Catherine Clark, professor and director of the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community at the Institute of Historical Research. Her new book is A History of England in 25 poems.
- [40:18]
Catherine Clarke
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