Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

It was while attending the Bicentenary birthday bash for Charles Dickens, thrown at the Shakespeare Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon, and listening to eulogies about ‘the greatest writer since Shakespeare’, that I began to wonder about Dickens the Poet. Shakespeare the playwright was, after all, Shakespeare the Poet (his one dramatic venture into prose was not his best – go on, what was it?). If it comes as a surprise that Dickens did, in fact, write poetry, it is simply that his enormous prose output has eclipsed the fact he also wrote poems – and plays, too, for that matter.

With over twenty novels, numerous short stories and scores of essays; his vast array of memorable characters and the intricacy of his plots; the legions of readers who eagerly awaited each episode of his serialised works; and the present day TV adaptors who have built whole careers on his output; there can be little surprise that his poetry has been totally disregarded. They were, after all, few in number, intimate in compass, sentimental in content and conservative in style. However, they are part of the total output of a great writer and do not deserve to be overlooked completely.

Take, for example, the Victorian appetite for sentimentality. Literary critics have long drawn attention to its presence in Dickens’ novels, usually as criticism, his detractors forgetting the enormous appetite his readers had for such a source of emotion. Small wonder, therefore, to discover that his most sentimental character, Little Nell, in The Old Curiosity Shop, is also the subject of a poem, ‘Little Nell’s Funeral’. It shares an affinity with another, ‘A Child’s Prayer’, a simple request for a night-time blessing to: ‘Keep me through this night of peril,’ though displaying a somewhat precocious awareness of the dire consequences of sin.

Several of the poems are, not surprisingly, also character studies: ‘George Edmunds’ Song’, ‘Squire Norton’s Song’, ‘The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers’. Here, the words ‘song’ and ‘hymn’ provide a clue. These poems were almost certainly meant to be set to music and sung at one of the many social gatherings which Dickens loved. A further poem, ‘Gabriel’s Grub Song’, reminds us of the author’s sense of humour. This is an epitaph – with the apostrophe in the right place – spoken, not by the shade of the late Gabriel but by one of the worms relishing this new addition to its diet.

That Dickens should draw on the Romantic tradition is hardly surprising, since he was brought up in the overlapping ages of the romantic and lyrical poets. One poem is of interest here, ‘Lucy’s Song’, which reminds us at once of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, in which the poet mourns the early death of a lost love. The writer cherishes Lucy’s ‘calm repose’ when: ‘The gentlest wind more gently blows, / As if to soothe her in her sleep.’ But, for himself: ‘In my breast alone / Dark shadows remain; / The peace it has known / It can never regain.’ Is this simply pastiche or poem of genuine sentiment?

If asked to choose a favourite among Dickens’ poems mine would be one of the few that has no human subject. ‘The Ivy Green’ celebrates the success of a plant that might be dismissed as a parasite. He describes: ‘How closely he twineth, how tight he clings / To his friend the old Oak Tree.’ But that word ‘friend’ soon takes on an ironic overtone: ‘For the stateliest building man can raise / Is the Ivy’s food at last.’ Despite its deliberately archaic language, there are hints here of poets yet to be: Hardy and, possibly, even Hopkins.

Minor literary curiosity maybe, but it is to be hoped that Dickens’ poems are not entirely overlooked in his festive junketings. Enough has now been said – except that I cannot resist one bizarre and totally unrelated footnote. While I was living it up in Stratford, a similar laudatory group was meeting in Philadelphia’s Dickens Library to admire an exhibition of memorabilia that included the stuffed cadaver of Grip, the author’s pet raven, whose own career was confined to a walk-on part in Hard Times until he inspired Edgar Allan Poe to give him star billing in ‘The Raven’. From me, however, ‘nothing more’ – though not, I hope, our editor permitting, ‘Nevermore’.