If that title turns you off, just before you go, please jump to the end of the blog, where you will find this week’s dose of Tao….and I promise: no literature next week.
For those of you made of sterner stuff:

One of the unanticipated pleasures that corona has brought with it, for Bernice and myself, is that of, respectively, being read to, and reading aloud. I can’t speak for Bernice, but, for me, there are two pleasures in reading aloud. First, it appeals to the aspiring thespian in me. At various stages of my life in Britain, I was involved in amateur dramatics; I may even bore you with my old stories of treading the boards one week. This, together with bridge, is one of the things that fell by the wayside when we came to Israel, despite Israel boasting a thriving (if often less than cutting edge) amateur English-language theatre scene (and a thriving bridge-playing community).

These days, I find myself musing whether ‘I could have been a contender’ (at drama rather than bridge). Twenty years ago, I think I could have made a decent fist of the role of Martin Dysart, the psychiatrist in Peter Schaeffer’s Equus. I would, I am sure, have been more Peter Barkworth (urbane, and in greater control of his suppressed passions, in a magnificent BBC Radio 4 production from 1980) than Richard Burton (rather more impassioned, in a considerably less nuanced, but still worth watching, film from 1977). Sadly, I cannot find the radio production for you online.

I am grateful for the opportunity to perform for an audience of one, especially such an appreciative one, and we have been remarkably fortunate in our choices to date. We have just finished reading Madeline Miller’s Circe. I realise that we came very late to the party for this novel, but, just in case any of you haven’t read it, stop reading this blog now and order it online.

It is feted as a feminist imagining of the story of Circe from Greek mythology…I can hear some of you saying to yourselves: ‘Well, that sounds like a book I certainly don’t have to read!’, Yes, I would have steered clear of it too, if it had not been so warmly recommended by someone whose opinion we value highly.

What we found, as we started reading, is that in turning the spotlight on what is a minor goddess in The Odyssey, Miller has created someone whose self-awareness, passion and strength in adversity all make her a very attractive character. I say ‘created’ although it feels much more as though Miller has faithfully drawn all of her ideas from the source, and ‘simply’ revealed the full roundness of the Circe hinted at by Homer.

The novel also imagines the world of Greek mythology, and describes it in utterly convincing detail: we feel that this is exactly how it must be to develop your magical powers as a witch; these are surely the authentic details of the logistics of a man’s body morphing into a pig’s; this must be just what it feels like to have the sun god for a father.

All of this is expressed in vivid, clear language, rooted in the world it is describing. Circe is nothing less than a joy to read; I cannot remember any book I have so relished reading aloud. We both found the book so thrilling and so delicious that we strictly limited ourselves to one chapter per sitting. This was exquisite torture since every chapter both recounts a self-contained episode and ends on the kind of edge-of-your-seat cliffhanger that I have seldom encountered outside Zorro or Batman. As we approached the end, we did all we could to eke out the last twenty pages.

The only trouble is: what do we follow Circe with? We haven’t finally decided yet, but we will have to work hard not to feel disappointed in whatever we choose.

In tandem with the novel, and as an appetiser before each reading, we have been selecting a volume of poetry and reading a poem a day. For the last couple of weeks we have been reading Carol Ann Duffy’s wry feminist collection The World’s Wife, an amuse-bouche indeed. Duffy served as poet laureate for a decade until 2019, and for those of us who associate poet laureateship with the likes of Robert Southey, William Wordsworth and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, she represents a bit of a departure.

The World’s Wife is woven around the saying that ‘Behind every famous man…’ It is a series of tongue-in-cheek monologues by the wives of great males of history, from Aesop to Quasimodo, from Odysseus to Elvis, and from King Herod to King Kong. The poems are insightful, witty and delightful.

Having completed this thought-provoking confection (if that’s not an oxymoron), we turned to a book Bernice received as a 50^th birthday present, The Nation’s Favourite Poems. In 1995, a BBC TV book programme conducted a poll to discover Britain’s best-loved poems. Nobody would suggest that this was a scientific survey: the responders were self-selecting, both in choosing to watch the programme and in choosing to submit their choices. However, the final league table of the top 100 poems makes interesting reading (not necessarily the poems themselves, you understand, but the list).

The first point to make (not, I suspect, predicted by the devisers of the poll) is that the most popular poets were less likely to do well if they had written a large body of popular work. So, for example, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats and W H Auden did less well than you might expect, because votes for them were split between several poems.

The other thing that strikes me, as we start to work our way through the 100 winners, is how respectable and dusty the collection is. Only one of the top 12 poems, and only 23 of the 100, were written by poets born in the 20^th Century. 22 of the top 36 poems are ones I was taught in school, and a further 8 of those 36 are ones I taught 10 years later in school.

What to make of this? Well, I should point out at this stage that, in 1995, most of the viewers of The Bookworm were probably retired. The programme was screened at 4:20 in the afternoon (with view on demand still decades away).

It also appears that most of the poetry that most of the population (even the reading population) read and enjoyed, they first read in school. Indeed, I wonder how many readers, then or now, read poetry regularly or, indeed, at all, in their adult life.

In addition, much of the poetry that we read in school, and that we were required to learn by heart and recite, has an incantatory quality that stays with us. This is perhaps best reflected in the two most popular poems in the poll. If I tell you that they both rely heavily on recurring structures and language, that one is overtly character-building, and the second is steeped in English mythology, you might possibly be able to guess that topping the poll was Rudyard Kipling’s If, with twice as many votes as the runner-up The Lady of Shalott.

If that second choice elicits from you the reaction: ‘The Who of What?’ there is no need to feel embarrassed. Tennyson’s poem has, with considerable justification, slipped out of the public eye in the last half-century. I haven’t even bothered to give you a link to the poem online. If you don’t know it already, I see little need to inflict it on you at this stage. Bernice, who did not remember ever hearing or seeing it before, was singularly underwhelmed by it, despite a magnificently sensitive and evocative reading by yours truly.

Number 3, however, was a different story. This was, again, one Bernice didn’t recognize, although I remembered it very clearly. I thought I knew it from primary school, but I may be over-estimating the sophistication of myself and my peers. Whenever I met it, its mysterious quality, and its sense of an underlying and undisclosed narrative, have stayed with me over the years. It is Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners, and, if you do not already know it, I feel it is worth a visit.

As I looked through the entire list, I noticed that none of the poems that I grew up with (1958–1968) were anti-establishment. Many were apolitical – dealing with nature, recounting historical events without commentary, or capturing and analysing human emotion – and those that were political were jingoistic, pro-establishment and conservative.

When I fast forward to the poems I taught in Britain (1976–1986), I find that almost all of them inhabit the contemporary world of the poet, and many of them are political with a small ‘p’, exposing and addressing social problems of the age. Far too often, the tone is bleak, the mood one of the world’s failure.

This starts with the First World War, whether in the wistful sadness of Wilfrid Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth or the dark cynicism of Siegried Sassoon’s The General. It continues through the Second World War, as condemned in Louis MacNeice’s Prayer before Birth. It goes into the post-War Britain of the Welfare State, and its failed promise, with Charles Causley’s Timothy Winters. It bemoans the nuclear family, with Philip Larkin’s This Be the Verse (Warning! Contains strong language). All in all, it’s a pretty bleak read.

So there is this very strong contrast between the two ages of poetry in the first half of my life. This is not poetry written then, but poetry promoted in the public sphere then. I can think of no better way of conveying this shift, this contrast, than by putting alongside each other two poems by two contemporaries. Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) and Wilfred Owen (1893–1918). In 1914, before he had seen any action, and a year before he was killed in action, Brooke wrote the stirringly patriotic The Soldier, calmly facing the possibility of the ultimate sacrifice, and the recognition that, if it is a sacrifice for one’s country, it is to be embraced with grace.

The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of me:
      That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
      In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
      Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
      Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
      A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
            Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
      And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
            In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

By the time Wilfred Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est (It is Sweet and Fitting… [to Die for One’s Country]), he had seen horrific action on the Western front, spent a long convalescence In England, during which he recovered from shell-shock, and was preparing to return to the front, where he was to meet his death just one week before the armistice was declared.

Dulce et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. –
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Your reward, gentle reader, for staying the course, is to learn the exciting news that, after a one-month hiatus, Micha’el and Tslil have just released the latest video on their YouTube channel. You may want to watch it because of the clarity with which Micha’el explains how things are going, and sheds light on their approach to life in general and the challenges they are facing. You may, on the other hand, just want to watch it because of the opportunity it gives you to see Tao throwing himself into work on the land. Either way, from where I’m sitting, it’s a worthwhile watch. Liking, subscribing and commenting are also warmly encouraged. Here it is: