Vernon Scannell - Memorable Lines

Memorable Lines

His obituarists heap praise on Scannell's verse and give their readers some examples of his most memorable lines:

• From Walking Wounded (1965):

A mammoth morning moved grey flanks and groaned.

In the rusty hedges pale rags of mist hung;

The gruel of mud and leaves in the mauled lane

Smelled sweet, like blood. Birds had died or flown,

Their green and silent attics sprouting now

With branches of leafed steel, hiding round eyes

And ripe grenades ready to drop and burst...

Then into sight the ambulances came,

Stumbling and churning past the broken farm,

The amputated sign-post and smashed trees,

Slow waggonloads of bandaged cries, square trucks

That rolled on ominous wheels, vehicles

Made mythopoeic by their mortal freight

And crimson crosses on the dirty white...

The mist still hung in snags from dripping thorns;

Absent-minded guns still sighed and thumped.

And then they came, the walking wounded,

Straggling the road like convicts loosely chained,

Dragging at ankles exhaustion and despair...

Remembering after eighteen years,

In the heart's throat a sour sadness stirs;

Imagination pauses and returns

To see them walking still, but multiplied

In thousands now. And when heroic corpses

Turn slowly in their decorated sleep

And every ambulance has disappeared,

The walking wounded still trudge down that lane,

And when recalled they must bear arms again.

• From Missing Things:

I'm very old and breathless, tired and lame,

and soon I'll be no more to anyone

than the slowly fading trochee of my name

and shadow of my presence ...

There's something valedictory in the way

my books gaze down on me from where they stand in disciplined disorder, and display

the same goodwill that well-wishers on land convey to troops who sail away to where great danger waits...

• From A Note for Biographers:

What captivates and sells, and always will,

Is what we are: vain, snarled up, and sleazy.

No one is really interesting until

To love him has become no longer easy.

• From The Long and Lovely Summers recalling idyllic times walking on the Chilterns above Wendover:

And yet we still remember them - the long

And lovely summers, never smeared or chilled-

Like poems, by heart; like poems, never wrong;

The idyll is intact, its truth distilled

From maculate fact, preserved as by the sharp

And merciful mendacities.

• From Remembering the Dead at Wadi Akarit:

Disposed in their scattered dozens like fragments of a smashed whole, each human particle

Is almost identical, rhyming in shape and pigment,

All, in their mute eloquence, oddly beautiful.

• From The Loving Game (1975):

A quarter of a century ago

I hung the gloves up, knew I'd had enough

Of taking it and trying to dish it out,

Foxing them or slugging toe-to-toe.