Sir, – Conor Murphy’s article (“What an old Leaving Cert poetry book taught me about thinking”, November 3rd) sent me to my own copy of Soundings, which I shared with my sister Martha when she followed me through the Leaving Cert.
Murphy recalls that the poems in his wife’s copy came with questions but no notes, and that students were forced to think for themselves because there were no other options. The anthology’s editor, Augustine Martin, intended exactly that. As he put it in his introduction, “nobody – teacher, classmate, critic or parent – can read a poem for you”.
Like Murphy’s wife, we wrote our answers straight into the book. I wrote in pencil, as she did – though, unlike hers, mine is fading. I meant to rub it out before the book passed to Martha but never did. Beside the last line of Hardy’s Afterwards, in which the poet imagines his own funeral bell, I solemnly noted: “He does not hear the bell.”
Martha, with no one after her, wrote in biro. Beside Shelley’s Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples, she was briskly unsympathetic: “He should not moan because of the beautiful countryside.”
RM Block
Poems, Martin wrote, were not there to please teachers or examiners, and the first virtue of any student of poetry was intellectual honesty. He got it in the margins of our book.
Martin also wrote that no poem means quite the same thing to a reader at different stages of life, and that a great poem “enters the mind and haunts the memory”. It seems he was right. Many of us, like Murphy, are rereading our old copies. Our book still has room in the margins to write in. – Yours, etc,
BARBARA CLANCY,
Stillorgan,
Co Dublin.
