It seems like only yesterday that they were putting up beautiful poems on the Underground... and now the posters, cards and letters from the poets who took part in this public art project will be preserved for future generations.
Life flashes past. Poems are signposts along the way. Love, sex, motherhood, divorce, dementia, death – there will be a verse for all the biggies.
When I was six, our class were all entered for a verse-speaking competition in the town hall. Trip-trap up the three steps; hands by your sides, eyes fixed on the far wall; recite a short poem to the audience.
Someone dinged a bell for you to begin and the adjudicator scribbled furiously.
The poem began: “Sleepy town is very nice.” Not Shakespeare then.
Life flashes past. Poems are signposts along the way
I came third and won a medal. I have no memory of it. What I remember is arriving home to my mother, stood at the old mangle, wringing out bed sheets. How she paused from hard labour and smiled and handed me a bag of sweets. This was way more unusual that the medal… an apple or an orange, perhaps, but rarely a lemon bonbon or a dolly mixture.
That was how my love for poetry began: at an old iron mangle. It was my mother who shared her loves with me – Tennyson and Donne, Heaney and Kavanagh and Wilde.
Even under the drudge of ironing and cooking for eight, she’d say a few lines and her heart would soar.
Later I loved the lines from the poems on the Underground walls. The project began in 1986 and was initially conceived by writers Judith Chernaik, Gerard Benson and Cicely Herbert. Poetry on the Underground brought the verse out of books and dusty shelves, let it take wing, soar and settle… finding a home in some stranger’s heart.
For in all the busyness, a line of poetry connects you to a deeper truth.
Philip Larkin’s The Trees was among the first to feature in the project. “I am glad your project is being favourably regarded. It makes me wonder whether I shall ever actually see one of the poems in the proposed location,” he wrote in August 1985 to the organisers.
He died aged 63 that December. He never lived to snatch even a fleeting glimpse of his lines through a train window. But others read them.
Seamus Heaney’s poem Railway Children also featured. Later, in a card to the organisers, he wrote: “I admire you for keeping the Underground poems a priority: it is worth doing and has made a difference, I am sure, to the life-worth of poetry for many people. Blessings on the work.”
What I remember is Heaney reading a poem he wrote about his honeymoon and running with his wife through Underground tunnels, late for the Proms, buttons falling from her coat. It made me smile.
My mother kept a notebook where she wrote out her favourite poems. They are prayers of a kind – solace in difficult times. “Sometimes although we cannot pray / A prayer utters itself.”
At school in 1972, our teachers brought us Heaney and Kavanagh, the poets of our landscape and our souls. Later I discovered Eavan Boland and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.
More recently, going through my mother’s possessions, I found two handwritten notebooks. One spoke to the domestic – the world of the old mangle and then the twin tub (oh joy) and cooking dinner. In it, she listed recipes gifted by friends: “Peggy’s rum truffles. Chris’s hind bees. Mrs Craig’s lemonade.”
In the other notebook, she had copied out all her favourite poems, among them W B Yeats’ Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven and Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill.
This was how she nourished her soul.
She handed this love to me with the necklace my father gave her… pearls as precious as poetry on the Underground.