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How do you tell the story of 1,300 years of English history?
Through verse, according to cultural historian Catherine Clark.
In this episode of the History Extra podcast, she takes Lauren Good on a poetic journey through time, from the Black Death to literal bumfodder.
Along the way, they explore why we've got W.H.
Auden's Funeral Blues all wrong.
How Elizabeth Barrett Browning used poetry as a platform for social change and how such works offer uniquely human insights into key moments in history.
Hi Catherine, thank you so much for joining me today.
Hi, good to be here.
Your book A History of England in 25 Poems does what it says on the tin.
It covers the history of England from the 8th century to the present day in 25 poems.
Now Catherine, that's quite an undertaking.
When did you think, you know what, I'm going to summarise England's history in this way?
I think poems have a real magic for taking us, like time machines, inside moments in the past, because and these are poems written between the 8th century and the present day, so they cover 1300 years of England's history
And that magic of poetry is that it takes us into the events of history.
You know, the landmark events, the milestones.
So in the book, there's the Battle of Agincourt, World Wars, the Great Fire of London.
But crucially, poems also take us inside the feelings, the imaginations, the experiences of people living and breathing through history.
So that, I think, is the magic telling sometimes familiar stories of England's history, sometimes uncovering really surprising new stories, but taking us right inside.
And the other thing, I think, is that poetry can allow us to connect with familiar voices and perspectives, but also some much less well-known voices and perspectives, and sometimes those stories that have been marginalised or silenced in the archive.
I love this idea of poetry acting as a time machine.
I think We're quite ready to dismiss fiction, aren't we?
As simply fiction, but it does tell us a lot about the more intimate side of history.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
The idea of the time machine, you know, was really kind of central to my conceptualisation of the book.
And I think each chapter, you know, begins with a poem and that sort of opens a door, opens a portal, if you like.
And each chapter is a sort of immersive adventure in time travel into a moment in the past.
And there was one moment that particularly inspired that idea of time travel through poetry for me, when I was handling a 17th century printed book in the library.
And as I looked through it, it was a collection of royalist satirical poetry against the English Republic.
In the last section of the book, there was a wormhole burrowed through the pages, a literal wormhole, where the lava of some insect had munched its way through the pages.
And I held it up and I peeped through, avoiding eye contact with the special collections librarian.
And that just made me think.
You know, aren't books always a kind of wormhole themselves that can transport us somewhere else in space and crucially, in time?
And I think poems can be that very powerful particular kind of wormhole that take us right inside a moment in the past.
How did you go about narrowing it down to the 25 poems in the book?
It was a fun experiment.
You know, is it possible to tell all those centuries of history, all that kind of colourful contested, complicated history of England, in just 25 poems?
And each poem, as I said, starts a chapter and each chapter reaches out further.
But it was great fun choosing the 25.
And I had a few guiding principles.
I wanted the poems to take us right across the country, so different parts of England, obviously right across time.
So we start in so-called Dark Age Northumbria and the most recent poem was published in 2022.
But also, as I already hinted at, I think I wanted that range of different voices, allowing us to discover new ways into England's history.
So there were poems by men and by women, by people of very different social status and class, voices of colour.
There's even a poem in the book written by a child, so written by Lewis Carroll, but when he was still Charles Dodgson, when he was 13 years old, he wrote a poem to entertain his younger siblings.
And you know that's a great example of the kind of voice, a child's voice, that often isn't there in big sweep tellings of England's history.
So it's really about that diversity, about diversity, familiar poems that we know and love.
You know, Adelstrop is in there, a poem that I think is cherished by many of us, but also much less familiar poems that I think people will enjoy discovering.
Now, unfortunately, we won't have time to get through all 25 today.
People will have to read the book for the rest.
So I've chosen a small selection.
Can we start with the poem Pearl?
It's And it explores the love and loss during the time of the Black Death.
But first of all, what is this poem about on the surface?
So that's actually a really tricky question, Lauren, because it is such a complicated poem.
It's a dream poem.
So it's a poem about somebody's dream, telling the story of a dream.
And as we know, you know, dreams can be strange and hallucinatory and shapeshifting, and things aren't always what they seem.
And at the beginning of the poem We have what seems to be a jeweller grieving because he once had the most precious, beautiful pearl that he ever held.
And it's lost, alas.
And he talks about it rolling away from him into the grass and into the earth.
But it becomes apparent really quickly that the pearl isn't just a pearl, that it's a metaphor, and that the dreamer, who's speaking?
He's speaking in the role of a jeweller, but he's also speaking as a father.
And this exquisite, beautiful pearl, the most beautiful thing that he ever held and that he's lost and it's so heartbreaking is his little daughter, who's died and is buried.
So the poem is a vigorous, He's breathing in this beautiful garden where he lost his pearl.
He lies down on the grass to sleep and he has a vision and across a shining river, he sees a figure.
He doesn't recognise her at first.
But it's his daughter now in heaven and the kingdom of heaven.
And she tells him about this life, this kingdom beyond the world.
But it's a tricky poem.
It's full of complicated, as I said, kind of shape shifting dream imagery.
But at its heart is this incredibly powerful story of love and of loss and grief.
And it gives us a new and incredibly powerful and emotionally affecting way into that big story of, as you say, the Black Death in the 14th century.
It is such a big story.
And I think we often focus on the shocking statistics during these times of devastation.
But, as you've touched on poems like Pearl, they give us a more human, emotional view of these events, don't they?
Yeah, absolutely.
So we probably all you know touched on the Black Death at school or we all have some understanding of it.
You know, the statistics are mind boggling.
40 to 60% of the population killed by the Black Death.
But of course, we've lived through COVID-19.
We've lived through a global pandemic ourselves.
And we know that those statistics don't tell the full human story of a pandemic.
And I think that, again, that's the magic of poetry.
So it can kind of play with scale.
We have this huge historical story that I'm exploring in this chapter of the book, but we find our way in at the most intimate scale.
And it's that intimacy, I think, of poetry.
And this is such a different world.
You know, the way that the dreamer thinks and imagines is in some ways fascinatingly, alluringly strange and alien from our way of thinking.
But that grief of a father for his little daughter that is still as powerful today as it was then.
It connects with us across time and I suppose one of the things I find really fascinating in that story is the simultaneous immediacy and directness and familiarity of that moment at the end of the 14th century And also its strangeness.
So the language that the dreamer uses to describe his emotions.
For example, on one level, what could be more relatable than the depth of a parent's love for their child?
But some of the language that he uses is really strange.
So he talks about his grief, kind of swelling and bursting in his breast, and that relates to very early medieval medical ideas about the mind that it was this kind of hydraulic container in the chest that would swell with liquid when you were experiencing some form of kind of passion or emotion.
And he talks about his unrequited love, essentially for this daughter that he can't be with anymore.
He uses the word love danger.
Love danger and this is language from medieval courtly love and romance tradition.
It's sort of an erotic concept that love danger of love that can't be requited and that seems so strange to us to use, to borrow erotic language, for a parent-child relationship.
So there is real strangeness and alterity, but fundamentally that incredibly powerful, relatable story.
There are so many tantalising elements here.
There's so much going on and it's a really long poem as well, isn't it?
But something that really interested me is that you said there are clues about the location of this writer as well in the dialect.
Yeah, one of the wonderful things about this poem is that through the language and the dialect it's written in, we can trace its origins.
So it seems to have been written somewhere in the Northwest Midlands towards the end of the 14th century.
You might be thinking kind of Staffordshire, Cheshire, that sort of part of the world.
So on the page, the language looks really quite different from modern English and also very different from Chaucer's English, which isn't far away in time.
And there's a bit of Chaucer's incredibly colourful Wife of Bath's tale in the book as well.
That looks a little bit more familiar because that was London English, which is the forerunner of today's standard English, down to all kinds of political accidents and chances of fate that I won't go into.
But this poem.
I think that's another aspect of that sense of immediacy and connection, that we can hear the voice of someone speaking from the Northwest Midlands.
And it's very rooted in that kind of local, regional language.
There are a lot more words borrowed from Old English in the poem.
It's written, we think, by the same poet who wrote Gawain and the Green Knight.
So instead of the word man, we might get you know folk, we might get dialect and regional and older words that are still being used in the Northwest Midlands.
And, of course, thinking about the location and the place where the poem was written has also fed into lots of critical detective work about who the poem might have been written for.
Was it written for a particular patron?
Was there a particular young girl who died of the plague?
And sometimes scholars have looked for medieval girls and young women called Margaret, related to the Latin word for the pearl.
But the jury is still very much out and I think the poem is deliberately written so that it's not tied to one specific story and that, whoever you are and I think just as much today as then you can relate to it and you can maybe see something of yourself and your own experiences in the poem.
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You said that you cover a very diverse range of poems in this book.
We're going to move forward now to the early 1660s and to a very different feeling.
Poem Bumfodder, which satirises the rump parliament.
Catherine, what exactly was the rump parliament?
Again, this is a really tricky question, Lauren.
So the rump parliament was essentially those members of parliament who were left after Pride's purge in 1648.
So the purge of all those members of Parliament who were opposed to the execution of Charles I.
But the Rump Parliament goes through many different iterations across that period of the civil wars and the English Republic, the interregnum.
It's constantly being booted out, brought back in, members are leaving.
And by this moment in early 1660, it is really on its last legs.
As I say in the book, taking my inspiration from the scatological humour of the poem, it's the arse end of the rump parliament.
So it's the dregs, it's the tail end.
And when this poem Bumfodder is written, it seems that it really might be the last days of the hugely unpopular, ineffectual rump parliament.
And that for the royalist writer of this poem, the restoration of the monarchy might finally be in sight.
As you said, it really doesn't shy away from scatological humour.
And I think it's commonly thought that toilet humour is more of a modern thing.
But this really disproves that, doesn't it?
I've got to say Lauren, the earliest instance of farting in my book goes back to the 13th century and the medieval song summaries are coming in.
So yeah, it goes right back.
And yeah, the full title of bum fodder is bum fodder and it's to wipe the nation's rump with.
So to give the rump parliament a wipe, a good kicking, or... your own.
So it's 21 stanzas of pure, hilarious scatology.
So bum, poo and fart jokes.
And it's taking the rump parliament as its cue for that.
But there's also another reason, I think, why the poem is so hilariously fixated on bums and toilets and toilet humour.
And the clue there is in the title bum fodder, because this is not highbrow elite or courtly poetry.
This is the poetry of the street.
It's a broadside ballad.
And these were the popular culture of their day.
If you had a penny in your purse in early modern London you might be able to get a small loaf of bread, a beer or a broadside ballad.
You didn't even need to be literate to enjoy a broadside ballad.
You could enjoy kind of owning the material object of the piece of paper, the rag itself, but you could listen to it.
You could learn.
They were kind of like the viral memes of their moment in early modern towns and cities.
Millions of them are produced, but not that many survive.
And there's a good reason for that.
So they're called rags because they're early modern paper was made out of rags.
And many broadsides were read, enjoyed and then put to good use in the Privy where they did wipe the bums of early modern London.
So the title of this poem, Bumfodder.
Bumfodder is what you wipe your bum with.
If you've ever complained about I know I do sometimes a load of bumf through the letterbox, things that you know you don't really want.
We're using that expression.
You know we're saying we might as well Use it to wipe with.
And that's the joke of this poem.
It's going to wipe Parliament's arse, but you might well use it to wipe your own and then drop it down the privy when you're done.
It's an incredible idea that poetry was enjoyed by the masses but also served a very real purpose in people's toilets.
Yeah, it's hilarious, isn't it?
And you know, by all accounts, I haven't tried this with any.
You know wonderful archival survivals, but by all accounts it would do a great job because, you know, made out of scraps of rag, it would rival today's luxury toilet tissue for comfort.
But, you know, that explains why so many broadside ballad sheets no longer survive.
But it is the poetry of the street.
And the poem is really leaning in to all the scatological potential of thinking about the run parliament.
It's the only poem I think you'll ever read that rhymes Magna Charta with Magna Farta.
It's just this kind of torrent of scatological humour.
It also plays with one of the other poems weighs that image of the rump and the rump parliament was used, which is, you know, like a rotten old rump of meat that's hung too long on the butcher's hook.
It jokes about hemorrhoids that these ineffectual members of the rump parliament have you know, sat there too long.
They're not doing any good.
You know, they've all got piles.
You know, it has a lot of fun with this.
So we know from Samuel Pepys's diary that when the restoration of the monarchy was in sight, when the rump parliament was finally expelled, Londoners are out in the streets roasting rumps of meat on bonfires and so kind of leaning in to that imagery of the rump parliament.
And we also know that Samuel Pepys got together with some friends and he was singing a ballad to the tune that we know bum fodder was sung to.
So I love the idea that maybe Pepys and his mates were gathered together in a room singing these scatological verses together.
Now, the surviving copy that you reference is pretty rare because, as you said, a lot of these broadsheets were used as the equivalent of loo roll, I suppose.
But you mentioned it in the intro that it was in this copy that we see the tiny hole working through the pages.
Yeah.
So it's quite a strange journey that this broadside ballad that thought it was going to end up dropped down.
The privy has been on.
So some copies do survive of it in its original broadside form.
So just a sheet of early modern paper.
But the copy that I used was bound in a gorgeous book, Rump Songs.
It's a collection of royalist poetry satirising the ill-fated...
English Republic that was collected together by Alexander Broome in 1662.
And sometimes bumfod of the poem is attributed to him.
And, you know, that is fascinating because it's a beautiful little book.
It's gold tooled, got a beautiful engraved frontispiece.
And you know really who knew that this disposable you know fish and chip wrap newspaper rag that might have ended up dropped down the privy would find longevity in this gorgeous book.
And actually that it would be picked as one of my 25 poems telling the story of England.
But yes, it was reading this poem that had the encounter with the wormhole that really just gave me that idea of poems as a portal, as a way into time travel, into the past.
The next poem or portal I'd love to discuss is very different again.
We're moving to the mid-19th century, to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's The Cry of the Children.
What event was this written in response to?
Yeah, so it was written in response to kind of a series really of historical events, possibly kind of most prominently a terrible mining disaster in a coal mine in In 1838, the Husker Pit disaster, and this took place near Barnsley in South Yorkshire.
It was the summer and there was a freak summer rainstorm.
You know, those really, really exceptionally heavy summer rainstorms that sometimes happen.
It was in all the local papers.
There was terrible damage.
It talked about people taking shelter.
A local man was struck by lightning and unable to speak for a day or two after the event.
But the real tragedy that Elizabeth Barrett Browning is responding to was in Husker Pit, where 26 children were trapped in a drift tunnel, so a tunnel leading up to the surface by the rushing water.
They were pinned against a trapdoor and they were drowned, all 26 of them.
The youngest of those children was just seven years old.
They were children who were at the brutal end of the Victorian Industrial Revolution.
They were working down the mines.
That was their job.
Now that event was a trigger for public outrage nationally, for a renewed sense that something had to be done about the brutal use of children's labour in mines and in factories.
And there was a Royal Commission, a government commission published on the employment of children and very young people in mines and factories.
And that published just slightly later.
And that's what Elizabeth Barrett Browning is also responding to in this poem The Cry of the Children.
And what she did in writing this poem.
She worked through the evidence and the testimony in this government report.
And from that, she imagined the children themselves, kind of imagined voices of nameless children.
She imagined them speaking about their labour problems, about their suffering, about their experience of working in mines and factories.
You spoke about the broadside being spread across the lower classes.
In this time, we do see this spreading awareness and encouraging change.
What sort of change did follow the poem's publication?
Yeah, so I think that's a really important thing to highlight, Lauren.
And I think you know, perhaps today Elizabeth Barrett Browning would be, I don't know.
You know trying to get a hashtag started on social media.
You know, it is absolutely about awareness, visibility, about changing minds.
And I think for us today, her poem The Cry of the Children.
You know it begins with weeping children.
They talk about, you know, they can't tell the difference between flowers and weeds.
For us, I think it feels very sentimental, almost quite mawkish.
But Elizabeth Barrett Browning knew who she was writing for.
She was writing for a middle class Victorian readership.
And this, of course, is the moment when you know that middle class idea of the child is being invented.
You know I already mentioned briefly the poem written by Lewis Carroll when he was a child, which sits next to this one in the book.
And it includes instructions to children.
It's called Rules and Regulations.
And one of those instructions is believe in fairies.
That idea of the innocent child is being invented, but only for those children, only for those middle class children who have that luxury.
The children working down mines and in factories and subjected to these terrible experiences.
They don't have that same privilege.
And I think Barrett Browning, she was riding a wave.
There was already a sense of public outrage at the labour of children in mines and factories.
And she was amplifying that.
So what we see later and through the 19th century is this succession of laws raising the age for children's employment and also raising the age that children had to stay in school until 18.
And so you know, by the end of the 19th century, you know, most children are in school until they go out to work.
So there is this major change.
And her poem did make a difference.
It wasn't without some negativity in its reception.
Even some of her contemporary readers noticed had some problems with its sentimentality.
But it made change.
I really wanted to touch on that criticism because, as you've said, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was from a very comfortable background and she is writing very intimately about the working class experience.
Yeah, I mean, it's a real dilemma there, I think.
So, you know, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's personal experience did not encompass this.
And that's something that I examine quite closely.
In the book chapter I turn, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning did, to the testimony in that government commission in that report, which is incredibly powerful.
A seven-year-old child talking about you know, I used to find it hard to stay awake down the mine, but now I smoke my pipe and I manage.
Or an interview with one child who talks about surviving a terrible accident being burned.
And there's just a parenthesis afterwards that says, face quite badly disfigured.
Terrible, terrible detail.
But Elizabeth Barrett Browning transposes that into this quite lyrical, sentimental cry of the weeping children.
And an early reviewer said, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has written in poetry.
We mean here to speak in prose.
And he says, no, it is not always good when the children die before their time.
Picking up on her phrase in the poem, And he instead spells out the reality of what it might really mean to be caught up in a factory machine and pulled apart, or the terrible things that really could happen to children.
So even in its moment, there was some discomfort, some objection with the way that she transposes the realities of the factory, the mind, the testimony in this report, into a beautiful, moving poem.
But again I just want to emphasise, she knew her audience, she knew what would connect with them and her poem helped to make a difference.
It's always complicated.
For me it's the way that Barrett Browning's poem.
It connects with us imaginatively and emotionally, but then it takes us back into the archival evidence around the Husker Pit disaster.
It takes us back into those testimonies spoken by children.
It takes us back into the reality.
You know, in the early newspaper coverage of the Husker Pit disaster, one of the things that really lodged with me, that made a huge impact on me, when it lists the children who died, their ages are given and the age of one of the children is given as nine and a half.
And I just find that so powerful because it doesn't it speak of that kind of the precision when a child gives their age or when a parent speaks the age of their child nine and a half.
These were little children but you know, living through these terrible experiences and not always living through
Catherine, the fourth and final poem I'd love to cover is Funeral Blues by W.H.
Auden.
I'm sure listeners will recognise it from the opening line stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
It's so recognisable to so many now.
It's one of the best known poems referenced during times of grief.
But you say in the book that it was actually originally written for an entirely different purpose.
So this poem does have a backstory that I think will really surprise many people.
So as you say, Lauren, it's such a loved and cherished and treasured poem.
I think you know lots of us remember it from Four Weddings and a Funeral where John Hanna, the actor you know, reads that poem.
You But the first.
The original version of this poem was written by WH.
Auden for a play that he co-wrote with Christopher Isherwood called The Ascent of F6 in 1936.
And this is a play about the climbing of a fictitious mountain F6 and it's this kind of heroic, imperialist endeavour where a great man, a great mountaineer Ransom, is sent to be the first to make the ascent of this mountain.
And it's explicitly about empire and about power.
They want an Englishman to be the first to climb this mountain.
It's in fictional pseudoland, in British pseudoland, not Osnian pseudoland.
And they want an Englishman, a Brit, to climb it before an Osnian pseudolander.
And in the story, in the play, Ransom agrees to go on this expedition.
He's warned by local people in Pseudo-land that a demon lives at the top of the mountain and he's very dismissive.
He dismisses this as, you know, primitive native superstition.
It's very much within this imperialist mindset.
But as he climbs the mountain, his companions die one by one, and he begins to accept the existence of the demon.
When he gets to the top of the mountain, he meets the demon, and who's in the form of his mother, because it's all a bit Freudian.
And so he accepts its existence, but he dies.
And in the play the poem Stop All the Clocks is performed to commemorate the passing of this great hero Ransom, to celebrate his heroism.
It starts off with the same two verses that we're all familiar with, but then it turns into something comic and ludicrous, and exaggerated and ridiculous.
And it staged the whole poem in the play in a scene of clowning around.
So the speakers, the stage directions say that they're both trying to be heard over each other.
They're clambering on each other's shoulders and behaving in general like the Marx brothers.
It says.
So what's really fascinating is is that this is a poem that was written as viscerally satirical comedy, a satire on the cult of the great man, on the idea of patriotic public mourning.
But over time, it has changed.
Auden did some rewriting and then we've experienced it in different ways culturally.
And now we know and love it as this powerful, sincere expression of personal grief.
You mentioned that it was used in four weddings and a funeral, and that Faber even released a new Orden anthology in response to this.
Was that the moment where it entered public consciousness as a poem used for funerals, or had it already been used in that context before?
I think it had been used in that context before.
So first of all, Auden is reworking the poem as early as 1937.
So actually, one of the materials I was really lucky to work with in the archive as I was researching this book was a letter that Auden wrote to a schoolteacher at that time a Miss Boyd.
She'd written to him saying, what kind of modern poetry can be of interest to schoolchildren?
And he writes back this really brilliant letter saying well, I'm afraid that what poets are interested in aren't, as a rule, what schoolchildren enjoy.
And then he goes through his poems, it's brilliant, kind of listing ones that could be suitable.
There's a category of easy but perhaps not clean enough poetry.
And then clean, but perhaps too difficult.
And then he sends her this early draft, this early autograph copy of the new version of Stop All the Clocks and says I'm working on this at the moment.
So he reworked the poem to be a standalone cabaret song, so to have meaning outside of the narrative of the play.
And that's where it starts to make this journey to be a personal expression of grief.
When he switches in the verses that we know.
You know he was my north, my south, my east, my west, my working week.
All those, the my, it becomes something very personal.
But the poem has been well known and loved long before for weddings and a funeral.
It was used in the commemoration of the Heysel Stadium disaster.
So it's a poem that we've looked to for comfort and consolation in many personal and more public difficult moments and moments of grief.
But I think what's so fascinating is actually, if you look at those first two verses of the poem, you can actually see the traces of that very satirical origin.
You know, stop the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Or, you know, put black collars on the necks of the public doves.
Let the traffic policemen wear black gloves.
These are not the kind of timeless, elegiac images of mourning and grief and poetry.
They're really anchored in a kind of urban, suburban modernity.
In a way, they're a bit kind of naff.
But also they're about public municipal spectacle.
They're about staged pageantry.
They're about the civic.
They're crucially about the public or the political co-opting personal, private feeling, turning it into this staged show of proper emotion.
And, you know, the world that Auden is writing in got the rising cult of the great man.
You've got Hitler writing.
Stalin, Franco, Mussolini, these great, adored, dangerous, great men rising and being admired.
And you also have through totalitarian regimes.
You have the co-opting, the mobilisation, the managing, the manipulation of private feeling for public ends.
So we can see that in the poem.
And I think the amazing trick in the poem that we know and love today is that Auden is saying something really about when we're grieving in a way.
You kind of wish you could stop everything, stop all the clocks.
In a way, why can't the traffic all be stopped?
Why can't your grief be written in the sky for everyone to see?
It feels such an affront.
It feels so ridiculous that the world should carry on.
In a way, we've all had that sense of our grief being a great dictator wanting to just stop the world in its tracks.
And so, as a metaphor, then connecting in the later verses with that very intimate personal expression of grief, it works.
It speaks to us.
Are there any other examples that come to mind of poems that have begun as one thing and evolved into something completely different in how we use or understand them today?
So one example that I would point to, that begins one of the chapters in the book and I think it's such an iconic, such a touchstone poem today is John of Gaunt's speech from Shakespeare's Richard II.
So obviously this is an excerpt from a play, a Shakespeare play, but very quickly, within that first century of its existence, it's being excerpted, it's being put into anthologies, it's being treated as a poem in its own right.
So this is the this England, this sceptred isle, those words, those verses that are so often mobilised when we're celebrating England and Englishness.
And they have been on, my goodness, quite a journey because, of course, John of Gaunt's deathbed speech in Richard II it's not a celebration of England.
He uses that panegyric, that praising imagery of England.
But he says, but now, now it's corrupt.
Now it's at risk of collapse.
Now it's falling apart.
So those words that are so often used to voice They're sometimes used in quite jingoistic contexts.
That's not what they mean originally.
This other Eden, this sceptred isle, this precious jewel set in the silver sea, all of this it's but England's falling apart.
It's collapsing.
It's corrupt.
It's not that.
It hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
So that is a really interesting example of a poem.
It was slippery to start with, of course, because England is not, and never has been, a sceptered isle.
You know it's a text that elides the existence of Scotland and Wales within the island and lets England kind of expand to fill the whole of that geography, as if it's kind of predestined and perfect.
But that poem is one that is used very often to celebrate England.
It's used still sometimes to critique, to be a voice of dissent, caution and admonishment as well.
So a great example of how poems can start off as one thing in one historical moment and be used in other ways.
Finally Catherine, you've referenced this all the way through our conversation, but I would love your closing line on it.
Why should we pay more attention to poetry as a lens through which to view history?
So poetry takes us inside moments in the past.
So in my book, it helps me find new ways into the sources, the evidence to those stories of history.
But it lets us connect with the feelings, the imaginations of people living through the past.
I think it's about not just understanding history, but feeling history too.
And at the heart of this for me is the astonishing kind of empathy and intimacy that it allows for us.
So we might read the history books about the Black Death or about the Great War, or about crisis of faith and science in the 19th century.
But by reading the poetry, we can get inside what it really felt like to be there.
That was Catherine Clarke, Professor and Director of the Centre for the History of People, Place and Community at the Institute of Historical Research.
Her new book is A History of England in 25 Poems.
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