A Dwindling Body of Ageing Fish

 For several years in the early 1980s, and some more in the late 1980s, I was radio critic for the late lamented Listener. My nominal editor was the genial and very well connected Derwent May, the literary editor, but I had been appointed by the new-broom magazine editor, Russell Twisk, who clearly wanted to shake things up. Though he was cordial enough to me, it was clear that Derwent would sooner have had almost anyone but a young gadfly like me writing the radio column, and who can blame him? He was, anyway, an excellent literary editor, and during his reign at The Listener (he left in 1986 and was succeeded by Lynne Truss) published some very fine poems. As it happens, I have just come across a volume called The Music of What Happens: Poems from The Listener 1965-1980, edited by Derwent May (BBC, 1981), and it's a mighty impressive anthology. It includes, for example, four of Larkin's best, all originally published in the pages of The Listener – 'Cut Grass', 'How Distant', 'The Explosion' and 'The Old Fools'. I fancy I'll be dipping into it quite often, and maybe posting some of the choicer items.
  Stevie Smith was one of May's regulars. In the introduction to the anthology, he recalls that 'Stevie Smith, when she was alive, would send me her new poems neatly typed out, but accompanied often by a torn scrap of paper with a witty, spiky drawing on one side, and a discarded draft of another poem on the back. It was Stevie who told me that the first line of her poem 'Friends of the River Trent' – 'A dwindling body of ageing fish' – was copied from a news item she saw in the Angling Times in a doctor's waiting-room.' And here it is: 

Friends of the River Trent
(at their annual dinner)

A dwindling body of ageing fish
Is all we can present
Because of water pollution
In the River Trent
Because of water pollution, my boys,
And a lack of concerted action,
These fish of what they used to be
Is only a measly fraction
A-swimming about most roomily
Where they shoved each other before,
Yet not beefing about being solitary
Or the sparseness of the fare.
Then three cheers for the ageing fish, my boys,
Content in polluted depths
To grub up enough food, my boys,
To carry 'em to a natural death,
And may we do the same, my boys,
And carry us to a natural death.

That one reminded me of another fishing-related poem with a title plucked from an unlikely source – this one by Kay Ryan:

When Fishing Fails

Your husband is very lucky," observed Smithers,
"to have ornithology to fall back upon when fishing fails."
— Cyril Hare, Death Is No Sportsman

When fishing fails, when no bait avails,
and nothing speaks in liquid hints
of where the fishes went for weeks,
and dimpled ponds and silver creeks
go flat and tarnish, it's nice if
you can finish up your sandwich,
pack your thermos, and ford
this small hiatus towards
a second mild and absorbing purpose.

'I have followed my own tastes as they are now and as they were in my childhood...'

The other day, at a local fair, Mrs Nige spotted a slender volume with the unpromising title Favourite Verse. Equally unpromising was the dust-jacket photograph of a clump of primroses - but under the title was the very much more promising line 'Edited by Stevie Smith'.
 The book has a curious history, having originally been published (in 1970, the year before Stevie Smith's death) as The Batsford Book of Children's Verse. As such, it would have constituted one of the most eccentric children's anthologies ever. The title of the reissue, Favourite Verse, is very much more descriptive. As the Bard of Palmers Green says in her preface, 'In selecting verses for this book I have followed my own tastes as they are now and as they were in my childhood.' So it is a highly personal, not entirely child-oriented selection - and a fascinating one.
 A good many old favourites - mostly from Shakespeare and the Romantic poets - are there, but Stevie Smith casts her net wide, including traditional ballads and passages from the Old Testament among her selections. She is happy, too, to include five of her own poems (The Old Sweet Dove of Wiveton, The Frog Prince, Hymn to the Seal, So to Fatness Come and The Occasional Yarrow). There is a good sprinkling of American poets, from Longfellow to Robert Frost (Acquainted with the Night), with a bit of Whitman ('I think I could turn and live with animals...') - but, oddly, not a line of Emily Dickinson.
 Purchasers of The Batsford Book of Children's Verse must have been startled to find, on the very first page, these red-blooded lines from Matthew Arnold's The Strayed Reveller -

These things, Ulysses,

The wise Bards also

Behold and sing.

But oh, what labour!

O Prince, what pain!

 

They too can see

Tiresias:--but the Gods,

Who give them vision,

Added this law:

That they should bear too

His groping blindness,

His dark foreboding,

His scorn'd white hairs;

Bear Hera's anger

Through a life lengthen'd

To seven ages.

 

They see the Centaurs

On Pelion:--then they feel,

They too, the maddening wine

Swell their large veins to bursting: in wild pain

They feel the biting spears

Of the grim Lapithae, and Theseus, drive,

Drive crashing through their bones: they feel

High on a jutting rock in the red stream

Alcmena's dreadful son

Ply his bow:--such a price

The Gods exact for song;

To become what we sing.

Within the next few pages, we find Coleridge's Catullan Hendecasyllables (of all things), a passage from Shelley's The Masque of Anarchy (the first of two), and Robert Southwell's The Burning Babe. There's even some Crashaw later on (an excerpt from The Office of the Holy Cross) - and Hardy is represented by the wonderfully sardonic The Ruined Maid. Yes, this is very much Stevie Smith's Favourite Verse.
 In her preface, she tell us that the first poem she ever learnt by heart was Shelley's Arethusa (the poem woozily quoted by Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday). That was perhaps a strange place to start, but then Stevie was clearly an unusual child:
'Childhood thoughts can cut deep [she writes]. I remember when I was about eight, for instance, thinking the road ahead might be rather too long, and being cheered by the thought, at that moment first occurring to me, that life lay in our hands. Many poems have been inspired by this thought, at least many of mine have.'

Footnote: Stevie Smith fulfilled another commission for Batsford in 1959, supplying the introduction and picture captions for a volume called Cats in Colour. I'll keep an eye open for that - though I don't suppose it will be quite as rewarding as her Favourite Verse.