Looking Forward, Looking Back

                             

                                                                                    Sefton Park, Liverpool 1970

Looking Forward, Looking Back

 

As you may know I am a frequent Twitter user and now that it has changed to X, despite some misgivings, I have continued to interact the with the site. So it was that during December I became the follower of another Twitter user, Beci, who had posted there a recording of a poem by Charles Lamb, poet and essayist, who had lived from 1775-1834. I knew very little about Lamb apart from the fact that he had written Tales from Shakespeare together with his sister, a book designed to make the plays more accessible to children - I had read "A Midsummer Night's Dream" to one of my Yr7 classes. Anyway, after some research I discovered that the poem being read was "The Old Familiar Faces", a nostalgic episode from Lamb's youth published in 1798, and that Beci had somehow recorded herself giving a reading of it for her Twitter followers. 

I listened to the poem a few times and it wasn’t long before the cadences of the verses were finding an echo in my thoughts, particularly the lines: 

 

“I have been laughing, I have been carousing,

Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies,

All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.”

 

The poem describes the loss of friends, old and new, the loss of a lover, and the loss of a particularly deep friendship, and it ends by recording the deaths of some of the friends and the leaving of others in the group, ideas with which I could easily empathise. 

 

The Northumbrian poet, Basil Bunting, wrote in a comment on his poem, "Briggflatts": ‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard' and hearing “The Old Familiar Faces” read aloud, reminded me of how I had always encouraged my adult students to read aloud the verses that we had studied, for how much more powerful poetry is when one hears it read in this way. Performance Poets, a group to which I once belonged, know the value of poetry reading for their audiences and, although I was no Roger McGough, I have a deep regard for the way poets like him could transmit ordinary, everyday feelings through their poetical work: His “Let me die a young man’s death” was always a great favourite of mine.

 

Now, after listening to the recording of Lamb’s poem, my thoughts turned to songs, which brought me a further feeling of nostalgia: I had listened to Bob Dylan in his early years singing about a dream of the friendships that he once had:

 

“By the old wooden stove where our hats was hung

Our words were told, our songs were sung

Where we longed for nothin’ and were quite satisfied

Talkin’ and a-jokin’ about the world outside.”

 

His dream continues - about how the gathered friends never thought they could ever get old; but how since that time he has never seen any of them again. He ends by singing how at the drop of a hat, he would be happy to give ten thousand dollars, if their lives could be like that again.

I was eighteen when first I listened to that song; Bob Dylan was 20 when he wrote it; Charles Lamb was 23 when he published “The Old Familiar Faces”, so none of us had lived to any great age before nostalgia took its hold upon us. My own partiality for remembrance of events, people, and places is probably linked to my Liverpudlian background. On the album Rubber Soul (1965) John Lennon sings "In My Life" about places and people he remembers from there, and it is a song which is also a poem. When I was teaching an adult-education course about how reading literature can help us with our mental wellbeing, I asked students to bring their own favourite poems to share with the group. The idea was interpreted widely: one brought and read out the words to “In My Life”, while another read the words to “Nightingale”, by Leonard Cohen. Both students had been reminded of past partners by the lyrics of those particular songs.

 

To this day a group of my friends, pictured above, who had met in Liverpool as Sixth Formers, have continued seeing each other in London, in Cambridge and in Liverpool itself. Of those in the picture one has died and others have disappeared, leaving eight of us. At one meeting I read to them "Ithaka" by C.P. Cavafy, a poem about the journey that we might take to get there and the stops that we might make along the way. At the end of the poem Cavafy writes:

 

“Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.

Without her you wouldn’t have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

 

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

You’ll understand by then what these Ithakas mean.”

 

So my thanks go out to Beci for her wonderful reading on Twitter of “The Old Familiar Faces” which prompted me to write this piece. She has recently had an article published in a book of essays and studies which is referenced below. I hope that her journey is a good one. 

 

References

Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (1966)

The Beatles, In My Life from Rubber Soul (1965) 

 

J. P. Cavafy, Ithaca (1911) translated by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard (1975, 1992)

 

Beci Carver, How To Be a Marxist Thief: How Raymond Williams Read T.S. Eliot in Literature and Institutions of Welfare, Edited by Jess Cotton (2024)

 

Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan’s Dream from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)

Charles Lamb, The Old Familiar Faces (1798)

 

Peter Leyland, A View of Performance Poetry in AuthorsElectric September 2^nd 2020

 

Roger McGough, The Mersey Sound (1967)