I meant once more to write about a run,
Along the cliffs this time: heavy rain
Had made the dry paths into mud again
In this July with hardly any sun.
Just to escape from desk and get some air,
I started off along the Kinnessburn,
Wondering how many times I'd made that turn
Over the concrete path into a fair
Old mush of mud and nettles, shrubbery
Needing cut back. I cantered past the shop
And rushed the hill (or else you have to stop).
Some children greeted me with rubbery
Features made mobile by their cheeky words,
Some harmless fun, like 'Hi there!' , 'Guten Tag!',
Others half-muttered. It was at this point
That the idea of running poets came
Into my head; there must have been some name
That set it off - Sorley, perhaps, who ran
At Marlborough; I'm sure Bruce Tulloh can
(Who tried out barefoot running in the mud
Long, long before the time of Zola Budd)
Give much more detail of his runs across the Downs
In all weathers - hail and wind and rain
As well as sun, warming his limbs; no frowns
When the wind cools your face, you cross a lane
Deep below hedgerows, and climb up again
Over a stile and back on to the path,
A black cloud scuds in view, a sudden bath
Soaks you, but never mind, up the next hill
And floating down through ploughland you can still
Think of that phrase: we do not run for prize:
War cut his life short, a sad sacrifice.
Most people run at some time in their lives,
Whether compulsorily or by choice;
Some do it for fun, some find in it a voice
For self-expression, 'pour se constater',
To prove themselves at something day by day.
Poets maybe don't need that; but of course before
They started writing, they needed something more
Obvious, like running, football, other sport
To get them ready later on to court
The muse - a Gravesian phrase - did Robert run?
He doesn't mention it in Goodbye to All That
But I have the feeling that he must have done,
At least at school. Sassoon went running too
Following hounds through copses thick with twigs
Returning home at evening soaked right through,
Riding through country lanes beneath the stars,
Little knowing that the gods - especially Mars -
Would have it in for him, for all the gentry
Whose living conditions would soon be those of pigs
Down in the trenches,in the Times an entry
Under 'Missing:presumed dead' all that was left
Of midweek hunts.Their families all, or nearly all, bereft
Of their young men, a superfluity
Of women to mourn the foolhardy vacuity
Of all those generals Siegfried had attacked
Most of whom had survived, and few been sacked.
'A land fit for heroes': that's a laugh -
Some slogans sound particularly naff,
Like 'cool Britannia', or 'the white heat
Of technology': you lose your seat
And the next government starts it off again,
Hoping to be like sunshine after rain -
Maybe a little war would help with re-election?
Some policies just do not bear dissection.
Enough of war - turning back history's covers
Let's jump in bed with one or two young lovers:
Wordsworth had tender feelings for Annette
(I think her name was) whom he couldn't forget,
Although he tried to: Wordsworth used to walk
Enormous distances, was prone to talk
To Coleridge and to Dorothy about the weather
And politics and everything else together.
In those days 'pedestrianism' was the name
Given to running or walking, both the same
But done to a much different degree.
The 'peds' prepared for six months for a race
Against the clock, learned to judge their pace
To cover ten miles in an hour or more;
Footmen took messages from door to door
Or ran ahead of carriages to check
For highwaymen, stones on the road, a wreck
Of someone else's carriage in a ditch.
The King of Saxony had a Dalmatian bitch
Or maybe two, who ran alongside his carriage
Along the road to Leipzig. At a marriage
Footmen (the name's origin's clear) would present
A liveried escort. Runners represent
The messenger tradition all over the world:
Marco Polo found that the Great Khan
(Well, Coleridge rhymed it) got every fit young mhan
In China's provinces who was swift of foot
To relay messages. Each wore a suit
Festooned with bells that jingled as they passed,
Fearful of punishment if they were late.
The Incas too had runners who were fast:
Called chaski, messengers of the royal road
Conveying shellfish or quipu in code
To quipumayoc - a sort of Inca priest -
From North to South, and back again, to East
And West a little way.From up in modern Quito
To modern Santiago they ran their leg
Up or down mountain staircases or across sand
Where adobe walls still demarcate the land.
I'm told that little boys round down the mountain
From Macchu Picchu to the village fountain
Still following the Peruvian tradition
Of chaski messengers, and charge admission
Of a sort to watch them. They expect some cash
To compensate them for their headlong dash
Just as I do for noting down the details
That come into my head: everything retails
At a price that will suit somebody. I'd better
Return to study of the written letter
Which Latin always put in plural form:
'Litterae humaniores' were the norm
For undergraduates who studied arts -
There were those who said that only old farts
(To use Will Carling's phrase) taught Latin.
I found some bits of it as smooth as satin,
Especially Q.H. Flaccus and Catullus.
The Bishop's palace, beyond the portcullis
Was where I sometimes read the texts we had
To read (a principle that's good and bad,
Because what's on the syllabus becomes
Something inedible, like day-old crumbs
Swept to the floor from literature's pine table).
By dint of reading each one ten times over,
If not a hundred, I was soon in clover
And knew some of the poems inside out
And back to front, remembered whereabout
Horace had brought Leuconoe into play,
Seeking to know her fate, not plucking the day,
Trying out the Babylonian numbers, like the Lottery.
When I am very old, my eyes growing watery,
I'll still remember 'Tu ne quaesieris',
Recite it while on a jog out to Ceres
Or up to Boarhills, along the Kingsbarns coast,
Or round the Links, the places I love most.
Moving back to literary connection:
The earliest one within our recollection
Is the Epic of Gilgamesh, written on clay,
In which the innocent but noble Enkidu
Who ran with deer and antelopes all day
But ended up disjaskit, feeling blue,
Was lured by friends to dally with a harlot
For seven long days and nights the Sumerian starlet
Exhausted him so that he was fucked out
And when he tried to train couldn't raise a shout.
That story comes from 3000 B.C.,
Rather a long way back from you and me.
The Second Book of Samuel tells a tale
Of sudden death: Absalom hanging from the oak
In the Ephraim wood, tied on by his hair.
And General Joab who beside him stood
And with his sword deprived the boy of air.
King David waited for news of his rebel son,
So Joab sent two messengers, not one:
The first an Ethiopian,('Cushi' in Samuel II)
To tell him that the battle had been won
But that his son was dead. I think the black
Abebe Bikila of these days long gone
Must have known better than to run too quick,
Fearing his fate when he had reached the throne.
Anyway - up jumped young Ahimaaz, Zadok's son
A true-blue amateur who ran for fun -
And begged the general to let him take
The message to King David. 'Take your pick'
Was what he maybe said to Joab: 'I
Am younger, fitter, stronger than that Cushite guy
And am sure to get there sooner; so, send me.'
Joab must have pondered underneath the tree
Before, shrugging his shoulders, he turned and said 'OK,
You may regret it, but you can have your way.'
Ahimaaz shot off like a bitch on heat
Desperate to reach King David's royal seat -
You may think he was sycophantic, sought a job
By brown-nosing his way into the royal mob.
The wily old professional jogged along;
He maybe had a premonition of the song
About the high road and the long road - that a Macgregor wrote
While waiting in Carlisle to have them cut his throat:
The spirits take the low road through the underworld,
While the A1 is the high road with umbrellas furled
On summer days, and opened when it looks like rain,
And the low road beats the high road again and again.
In the Bible it's different - Ahimaaz won,
Brought the first news of the late rebellious son:
Whether he got kissed or screamed at, I don't know,
But the sensible decision was to run real slow,
To get there with your carbohydrate not too low
So that if the king decided to send you back
You could turn round and jog along the dusty track
Whereas Ahimaaz was knackered like an ancient horse
And couldn't raise a gallop: don't know which was worse,
To lie there on the carpet looking all shagged out
Or to do your daily training with your candle blown out.
I'm with the Ethiopian who trained every day
And enjoyed his running as we all do today,
And don't applaud young Ahimaaz, for his attitude's all wrong:
You can't get fit for running by stringing along
And hoping to run a record - if he thought he could
He should have been left sitting in Ephraim wood.
Homer had an episode I'm sure you know
In which Ajax and Odysseus and a third guy sprint
But the race is interfered with by that divine bint
The goddess Aphrodite whose pink fingertips
Chuck a slithery dark-brown cow-pat on the buttercups
So that one of them falls over, Odysseus wins the race.
There's another bit of Homer, different time and place,
Where Odysseus is so stiff-muscled that he's off the pace
And decides to stand and watch things - his ship's just in
and he hasn't got his land-legs so he cannot win.
St Paul knew running: his great metaphors
About the race of life make that quite clear.
The Greeks believed in sport: He who abhors
Bodily exercise is no whole man.
They had some women's games, too, for the sheer
Enjoyment, I would think, without the wreath
Of laurel or wild celery for the victors.
My ancestors were runners, too: Rob Roy
(Whose father's name was Donald, strangely enough)
Sent clansmen to be tacksmen of the Grants
On Speyside in the early 1700s: tough
Wiry messengers, at seven mile an hour
They covered thirty miles or more per day
Barefoot in kilts, or wearing baggy pants
In winter, perhaps. Knockando was the place
Where they were given land to settle on,
Their status changing from messenger to farmer.
My great great grandfather showed he had that gene
For covering long distance, for he walked
Carrying a globe that he had made himself
From wood and papier-mache - many a skelf
Had lodged in his long fingers - through the snow
Of Speyside hills across towards Glasgow
And got a job - he must have been a charmer
To wheedle employment out of 'the' James Watt
Whom he convinced with his persuasive talk
That he was fit to be an engineer.
He wrote all this down in a much later year,
When he was old, a Victorian patriarch
Given to moralising in the dark.
So there's a connection, plain enough to see,
Between Rob Roy Macgregor, James the engineer, and me
And Walter Scott as well, he of the limp
Who visited St Andrews twice, and wrote a symp-
Athetic highly embroidered novel
About Rob Roy, who fled from house to hovel
During proscription, in the end was forgiven;
Protected by the great Duke of Argyll
He took the name Campbell from his mother's side,
Sired five children, prospered, grew old, and died.
Nobody now would seek again to defile
His memory. Doesn't it all go to show
How intricate the bonds of hasard grow,
How close connections suddenly appear
From generation to generation, from year to year?
Highland grazier turned to cattle rustler
Sends runners to the whisky country, where
They farm and turn out no rogue or hustler
But generations of teachers and engineers
In whom poetic and running inclination
Every so often continue to appear.
I woke up this morning at half-past four
Sleeping in the study with the curtains open;
I thought it was still raining, but when I looked properly
It was only a drip in the kitchen: I went to join it.
That made two of us. The simple little jokes,
The same activities as Larkin got up to,
Dreeping your tatties and all the rest. I thought
Suddenly of those that were truly great
(Ah, these allusions!) and how metric feet
And running had so very much in common.
Dactyls and spondees, rhythm, rhyme and motion
Scanding the beat rowing across the ocean
Pounding of feet in the Greek chorus
(Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libera
Pulsanda tellus - Roman Horatius' words)
The rush of bare feet across the sand at Olympia
The gallop of Alexander's cavalry across the scrub
The quiet enjoyment of a rhythmic Sunday run
The pulse throbbing , beating like the sea
Pulling and surging like Homer or Milton
'O mighty voiced inventor of harmonies'
'Mantua me genuit, Calabria rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope
Cecini pascua, rura, duces': I hear him still,
Wee Erskine Wright, bleating monotonies
Yet managing to convey some of the majesty
Of Tennyson, Milton, Virgil, in 'Gen.Hum.'.
Or was it 'mighty-mouth'd' - I'd look it up
But do not want to interrupt the flow
Of line and rhyme and rhythm that inspired
Brassens and Brel and Barbara and Ferrat
And all the rest of them, running for cover
Under the shelter of literature and song
To put their little bit, big bit into words
And write that rhythmical prose so that a strong
Current is noticed, just as in life
The magnet pulls oxygen into my brain
And round and round and round we go again
In the coracle, twisting across the main
Hardly able to steer our way through things
That rise to meet us, take avoiding action,
Plunge in the paddles, try to point the unpointable
Round craft of self towards the distant shore,
Or maybe it's quite close, just an illusion.
Do you know Immensee ? Where Storm has Reinhard
Hopelessly lost, entangled for decades in Elisabeth,
Take off his clothes and swim across the pond
To try to visit a solitary white water-lily?
He never makes it; his feet get tangled up
In water weed, in roots under the surface
And as he shakes the pearling water from his hair
He sees the lily, never any nearer
Floating serenely on the moonlit pond.
That's not just about Reinhard and Elisabeth,
Of course not : it's about us
Trying to achieve the unachievable.
And that's the way it is in literature,
Trying to convey the power of the life-force
(This sounds like Shaw or somebody like that)
So that others can see it. When we throw ourselves
Gasping at having written something out,
Like lovers after mating, like runners after a race,
Down on the turf and close our eyes, or look up
Recumbent at the clouds and just relax,
That's the response we get after reading a poem,
Whether it's catharsis or tiredness I don't know,
But anyway I feel it creeping on
As I go back to looking at running poets.
Maybe not yet: did you see 'Field of Dreams',
Where Dustin Hoffmann
Played a baseball player who had a vision
That he should build a stadium in his field ?
It was all rather mystical, but it happened.
If ever they make a film about my life,
A rather unlikely circumstance, I'll admit,
I'd like Dustin Hoffmann to play me,
Someone who late in life fulfilled a vision.
My vision maybe started in the fifties
When running came to represent the dream,
The area of life where I could fulfil myself
Even though not much good at the beginning.
The cross-country races all started and finished in North Street
Outside the old Students' Union, where Prof Dickie
(A man with the most unusual middle name
Of Primrose, Edgar P. Dickie M.C.)
Started the races by dropping his handkerchief -
I always thought he'd had enough of guns,
A quiet and good man, sometimes almost too good,
Who turned away when he heard people swearing,
Destroying his idyll by raising their voices in anger.
I feel that too now,
Although like most people I sometimes swear myself
But not meaninglessly. I use language
To make a point or tell a joke, just like Prof Dickie,
Who loved to tell his rowing anecdote:
'They all rowed fast, but none so fast as stroke'.
Maybe it was the idea of rhythm
That got Alex Falconer going, the prof of English,
Who coxed some Oxbridge boat in the second division
With singular appropriateness: Shakespeare and the Sea
Remaindered in Henderson's bookshop. Literature
Like that is derivative and isn't worth reading,
At least that's what I think. All the mass
Of critical articles, the research is interesting
But in the end doesn't amount to a can of beans
Unless someone get perceptiveness out of it
And comes to see how writers saw their vision.
End of my sermon: back, perhaps to Yeats
Whom I imagine to have been a runner
When I read his account of the cloths of heaven:
There are feet there, feet that are going to tread
His dreams underfoot, walk on his cloths
But - I feel at this point a pricking in the eyes
Indicating emotion - he asks particularly
That she tread softly because she treads on his dreams.
That's what I ask of her, you and the muse,
To tread softly, not to argue and shout
But reading or writing, observe the cadence
Of existence and hold yourself back from upsetting it.
They say that Burns wrote 'Tam O Shanter' in a single night -
I can well believe it, that's how poetry seems to come.
In running that's how we get great performances
When we know everything's just going to work out right.
I've felt like that a couple of times - would't please you
To stand and listen to this a moment? The most
Astonishing was at the Town Hall, Manchester
On the second of June 1972. Alastair Wood,
A brilliant runner from Aberdeen, ironic
In nearly all his utterances, flame-haired, balding
Asked me what time I would do. (This was the qualifying race
For the Olympic team.) I told him: 2:15
Though I'd never run so fast.What daimon made me say that?
Normally (if there is such a thing) I was
Most circumspect about predictions.
Well, sure enough, I ran 2:15:06
And qualified to run the Games in Munich.
I still remember that surge of elation at Old Trafford,
Crossing the line with both hands held aloft
As if I'd won: well, really I had. That's how I feel
When these poems come out of me,the tingle
Of anticipation, the knowledge
That what I write is something that I have in me
And am being helped by someone or by something
To write ir down. Thank you, I'm grateful,
Even if the rest of you think it's crap. I don't.
I don't know if Kipling ran - I think he must have
When you think of that great comparison in 'If':
'If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run' -
Ron Clark, the great Australian runner of the Sixties,
Took it as title for his autobiography.
I ran with him once, just briefly;it was the morning
Just after the Commonwealth Games marathon
In which I'd finished 8th in Edinburgh,
So I was bushed. At first he asked 'Who's this?'
But recognised me when the Irishman Jim Hogan
Told him my name: he remembered my style,
Clumsy from the waist up, effective below it.
That's my link with Kipling, not very much
But something: so we can link with Gilgamesh,
That Sumerian monarch, run through the ages
And listen to Homer, and Pindar extolling the virtues
Of Olympic winners (in my case, I fear, in translation.)
Henri de Montherlant wrote a running poem :
Nous avons couru côte à côte, deux chevaux au même char.
That's the line I remember, two training together,
The laurel wreath of the stadium gleaming from afar.
He too maybe felt the divine afflatus
Blowing the cobwebs out of his mind.
It's never too late to do something different,
Never too late to feel that divine wind in your hair.
Matthew Arnold felt it when he wrote 'Dover Beach',
Those metaphors of sea and sucking, stones
Grating and grinding and being worn eternally smooth
In the darkness under the moon.
Tennyson felt it too, recounting the thoughts
Of Ulysses returning to Penelope,
Or sad old Arthur, his dreams gone up in smoke
After the brash new excitement of Excalibur.
I suppose it's bit like Tony Blair
Or any government which starts off fresh and shiny,
Well-scrubbed like a schoolchild on the first day back:
It soon wears off, the old cynicism returns.
That's why we need literature, why we need running:
To charge our batteries (note the metaphor we use)
As I charge mine most days with Bioflow.
I'm not qualified to write on Shakespeare ; nor on anything
Except, perhaps, some French and German writings
Which I know as well, I think, as I know myself:
Andersch's Sansibar, Horvath's Jugend ohne Gott,
Storm's Immensee, Max Frisch's Homo Faber,
To name the German ones that I like teaching,
Then the French: Terre des Hommes and Vol de Nuit
By St-Exupery, and then the verse
Of Hugo, Rimbaud, Lamartine,Verlaine,
De Vigny, Baudelaire, and all the rest
Of the familiar canon: Apollinaire,
Yeats, Shelley sometimes, Browning, Housman, Graves:
What better models can you take than these
In English or in German, does it matter?
These people felt the thunderstorms batter
At their emotions, ignored all the chatter
Of social conversations, got down to work
And poured themselves into it; Betjeman
Admired les sportives, an emotional man
He seems to me, who never knew him, but
I know some living poets who don't shut
The door of searchers after knowledge: Douglas Dunn,
Friend of P.Larkin, that son of a gun
Who in his turn was pals with Kingsley Amis.
Difficult to work out just whose the blame is
That Larkin got so depressed - but from it came
The crystal lines, the tongues of blue flame
Leaping around his poems, saying loud and clear:
'There's something very special we've got here.'
Somehow he reached across the reading spectrum
Like Dylan or Brassens strumming their plectrum
Touching a nerve, not of course in every being -
Not everyone likes poetry - but in the seeing
People who vibrate along the same length
Of wave, people who feel their strength.
Larkin, like Brassens, liked to be outrageous
And use occasionally - it's not contagious
In this case - four letter words to shock the public
Of the UK and of the French Republic.
I do it too, although a lesser poet;
If you have seed, then be prepared to sow it,
Don't hoard it up against another season,
Just writeit down, don't forget rhyme and reason.
Even though you're not sure what source of inspiration
Has bathed you in intellectual perspiration,
Just do your best, as you would do in a race:
Winning or losing, nothing is disgrace
Except abandonment of what you offer,
Dropping out is not a thing that you should proffer
To muse or public, you must keep on going
Though weariness and lack of fitness are showing.
Sooner or later you will take the tape
And with a prize of some sort make your escape.
As usual, I could go on and write more,
But sunshine now is falling through the door
As in a Liebermann painting of a room
Or a Renoir or Macke, like a loom
Loaded with threads of light that glow and spark
Off memories of encounters in the dark
Or blaze like sunflowers in the fields abroad,
Symbols of the devotion shown by God
Or whatever made all this majestic earth,
The Cairngorms, the silver Tay at Perth,
The floating islands on the Atlantic coast
And the silhouette I've come to need the most:
The towers that stand out dark against the bay
That I encountered only yesterday
But shape both my tomorrow and today.
