The Poets' Other Corner
By JAMES KIRKUP THE curious stroller in Hyde Park on a summer evening may find his attention drawn to a quiet little group gathered at Speaker's Corner. Is it one of those inter- minable arguments about " atheism" between a Jewish refugee and a puzzled visitor from the Midlands ? It is certainly not the 'teen-age group which huddles round a kind of Red Hot Momma singing She Wears Red Feathers. On closer inspection it turns out to be a poetry recital.
A plump, well-dressed woman is standing on an orange- box reciting a Shakespeare sonnet : " Tired with all these, for restful death I cry . . . "
Her voice is refined, a little arch at times, arid she can hardly be heard above the clamour of the orators and the noise of the traffic trundling round the Marble Arch. Her round, nicely made-up face under the smart hat is serious but strangely vacant as she turns her greying head from side to side, hands in coat pockets, her barely-opened lips enunciating crisply. Her mind seems to be on something else, as if she were using her platform simply in order to get a better view of the park and the passers-by. The pleasantly monotonous delivery continues without interruption from her audience. Just as we are beginning to think of her as a Sybil writhing on a tripod, her voice stops in the middle of a line. She gazes a moment at the Cumberland Hotel, then gives a little laugh : " Oh, it's gone clean out of my head, and I said it right through only last night. Silly of me, isn't it ? " There is a faint, encouraging murmur from the embarrassed audience. Most' of us don't know where to look. A young man and his girl standing with their arms round each other smile and exchange a kiss. One or two of the spectators begin to drift away, and the lady cries out : " Don't go away, folks, the night's young. Would any member of the audience like to step Up here and give us something ? " There is some unhappy shuffling in the crowd. Then a middle-awed man with glasses, who might be a bank-clerk, pushes through the crowd and says : " I'd like to read something if I may." He flourishes a large edition of Omar Khayyam. , " We don't read poetry here," says the lady scornfully. " Reading it drives them away. They like you to perform from memory. Anyhow we're sick of old Omar, we're always having him. Doesn't anyone know anything else What about you, Mac ? What about dear old Rabbie Burrrrrns ? " A Scots working-man, who has been listening devotedly to her all evening, gets on the orange-box and recites My Father was a Farmer. He speaks the poem briskly, but in so low a voice that only those in the front row can hear. Meanwhile the lady is mingling with the crowd, urging people to " get up and give us something." A Canadian soldier comes forward and says he would like to recite lnvictus. " By all means," says the lady. " We like variety here. Get up on the box, dear." But the soldier, who is very tall, refuses to. " Go on, dear, get on the box. Don't be shy. We're not proud here." The soldier compromises by placing one foot on the box and leaning forward with his elbow on his knee. He seems to be telling a quiet barrack-room story, and the poem sounds much better than it ever sounded before.
Next a little man with a tooth-brush moustache and a flashing, embarrassed smile gives us The Road to Mandalay with a great deal of energetic and appropriate gesture, speaking in a loud Cockney voice that suits the poem admirably. The crowd swells as he recites, and he gets a round of applause at the end. A young man in blue jeans and an open-necked shirt follows him on the orange-box. He says he is going to recite some poems, " rather modern in manner, I'm afraid," by Stephen Spender and Edith Sitwell. The large crowd listens patiently and intelligently. He goes on, surprisingly, to " the Lucy poems by William Wordsworth." These too are very much appreciated. His manner of speaking is natural and clear. The lines: " Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees," spoken beneath the wind-tossed plane-trees in the semi- darkness of a public garden, are solemn and fitting. All the old familiar lines come back to us renewed, with a shock of recognition: " But she is in her grave, and oh, The difference to me ! "
Finally he speaks a passage from Prometheus Unbound and When the Lamp in the Dust lies Broken, introducing them with a few explanatory words. He says them plainly and without fuss : he does not, like so many professional verse- speakers, try to make them sound interesting, but lets them speak for themselves. They are perfectly lucid, and the audience accepts them with enthusiasm.
Now the lady once more totters on her box, and, as if absentmindedly, while casting round in her memory for some- thing else, recites without stopping several poems by Housman. Then she launches out into Marvell, To his Coy Mistress, the poem most frequently heard at these gatherings. Her eyes, as she comes to " deserts of vast Eternity," gaze vaguely down the Edgware Road. The lamplight, falling through the plane- trees, moves across her face like inspiration. The traffic roars and hoots. Hysterical West Indians rattle off jumbles of opinion. Another crowd roars with laughter. Far off, the Welsh are singing, and another group is chanting : " Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee, E'en though it be a cross, that raiseth ine-ee . .
And, in it all, this little group of bent heads concentrates on the voice at its centre " giving them one more last little thing ". " . . . The breath whose might I have invoked in song Descends, on me; my spirit's bark is driven, Far from the shore,' far from the, trembling throng- Whose sails were never to the tempest given . '
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