I’ve been reading another gem of a book I found in Rotherham Library: Tom Paulin’s The Secret Life of Poems, Faber, 2008.

Having once been omnipresent, not least because of his trenchant opinion-giving on Late Review, Paulin appears to be a neglected poet these days; maybe he’s been quietly ostracised because of his views on Israel and Zionism.

Subtitled ‘A poetry primer’, The Secret Life of Poems analyses 46 poems (plus an excerpt from Macbeth), from the anonymous Elizabethan ‘The Unquiet Grave’ to Jamie McKendrick’s ‘Apotheosis’ from 2003.

Regrettably, none of the poets featured are black and/or minoritised, only two are women (Dickinson and Rossetti), and only two (Frost and Zbigniew Herbert) aren’t British or Irish.

Aside from those major flaws, though, I very much enjoyed Paulin’s takes on very familiar poems – such as ‘A Nocturnall Upon St Lucies Day’, ‘Frost at Midnight’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ – and the odd one new to me, e.g. Thomas Given’s ‘ Song for February’.

He’s brilliant at pointing out the layered, otherwise hidden foreshadowings and secondary meanings. Crucially, though, he stresses the fundamental importance of the sounds, the rhythms, the music, the emphases that poems make. In that vein, he quotes Frost, without stating the source, as follows:

The ear does it. The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I have known people who could read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They can get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.

Remember that the sentence sound often says more than the words. It may even as in irony convey a meaning opposite to the words.

I must bear all that in mind more consciously than I usually do.