National Poetry Day with Janet Morley

September 30, 2019

In the lead up to National Poetry Day we speak to Janet Morley about her latest anthology Love Set You Going: Poems of the Heart.

1. Why study poetry to reflect on love?

In a way, it’s a cliché to connect poetry and love; poets have traditionally produced romantic verses in order to persuade their beloved to return their passion. So it’s easy to suppose that poetry about love will feel a bit ‘soppy’, unless you happen to be in the grip of the early stages of being in love. But I think it’s a lot more interesting and complex than that. For one thing, there are many different kinds of love, and love has many stages. It can include ambivalence as well as a desire for closeness. It can go wrong, or be impossible to speak of, or fail to be reciprocated. Now the theme of National Poetry Day this year is ‘truth’, and I think this is significant. There is absolutely no point in writing poetry if you are not going to tell the truth, even though you may, in Emily Dickinson’s words, ‘tell it slant’ – intriguing the reader and making them work for the meaning. So I believe that poetry is a rich source of nuanced reflections about the complexity and importance of love, in all its guises.

2. Why is this anthology different from others on love?

There is a plethora of books of love poetry, so you might ask why we need another. But the majority are addressed exclusively to romantic love, whereas Love Set You Going ranges more widely, and explores also the kinds of love we find between adults and children up and down the generations, and the love that connects God and the human heart. As the book’s introduction puts it, love ‘is the source of our selves, and our capacity to grow and learn. It is the most important of connections between people, and it is the touchstone of how human beings relate to God. Love enables us to make meaning of our lives in the world and gives us hope for what lies beyond. It is completely humdrum and ordinary; it is mysterious beyond speech. It begins in the body, but it points us to eternity.’

So of course the book includes wonderful, passionate poems like Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘River’, John Donne’s ‘The Sun Rising’, and the extraordinary, erotically-charged ‘Strawberries’ by Edwin Morgan, and Rosemary Tonks’ ‘Story of a Hotel Room’, with its moving twist at the end. But the book begins with Sylvia Plath’s newborn baby in ‘Morning Song’, and explores the changing relationships with parents as we leave a vividly remembered childhood – Seamus Heaney’s ‘Follower’ and D H Lawrence’s ‘Piano’. And the last section addresses human passion for God or for the transcendent, in poems based on romantic love as depicted in the biblical Song of Songs, or in the self-examination of the heart engaged in by George Herbert, Christina Rossetti and Charles Wesley, or in the ecstatic, complex poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins in ‘Windhover.’

And in this anthology, each poem selected is accompanied by a reflective interpretative commentary, which helps the reader to notice what is going on in each poem, so that they can arrive at their own understanding of its truth.

3. What is your favourite poem in this anthology?

It’s very hard to pick out a favourite from this selection, just as it was painfully hard to make the selection in the first place, there are so many wonderful poems to choose from. But if I had to, I would choose a poem which is simultaneously very simple in its form and really enigmatic in its meaning, and which seems to point to a kind of love which many of us will never have experienced, namely the extraordinary connection that can be made during wartime between comrades who have faced mortal danger together. It’s a ballad by the Cornish poet Charles Causley, called ‘Angel Hill’. Causley enlisted in the Royal Navy during the second world war, and was stationed in Scapa Flow near Orkney. He and his mates endured terrifying attacks and saw comrades drown. The poem seems to be about a sailor who visits the poet’s home after the war (near a street called Angel Hill); he is a cheery character who reminds the poem’s narrator of the vows they made under fire, and he has apparently come to renew their close relationship. But the last line of each verse of this ballad has the narrator assert ‘No, never, said I’ – his own heart apparently frozen and stony in response to the sailor. Gradually I think you realise that this visitation is from a comrade who did not survive, and the narrator is completely unable to integrate this man’s life, death, and love for him into the new post war reality of his own hearth, and heart.

Listen to Jim Causley singing this ballad set to folk music here >>

Illuminated by Janet Morley's brilliant commentary, this anthology is for anyone intrigued by the touching, humorous, quirky, disconcerting, affirming, erotic and utterly mysterious nature of love.

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