In the middle of his prolific career, George Barker had three poems published in the TLS – "Epitaph for Many Young Men", "Song" ("O darkling valley of the Usk") and a version of the "Stabat Mater" – the first of which is probably the best of them. Here, this "writer and cad", as he once described himself on an official form, offers an ambivalent yet dignified response to death: for the "many young men" invoked in the title, there is the private singularity of the dedication; for all that the dead man is observed, his life understood and his death blithely placed "by a fireplace", his grave "will never be known", and his inner qualities remain merely hinted at. The fish and the football pools are our companions in a gently provocative process of mystification. "Therefore all poems are elegies" is the prose piece by Barker with which his Selected Poems (1995) begins; some poems are epitaphs, too, it would seem.

Epitaph for Many Young Men
(In Memoriam P. F. J., 1951)

In that ordinary year of anxiety and rain,
Some distinguished anniversaries and many crimes,
A young and quiet man died by a fireplace.
– Such things happen everywhere at times.

And yet the fish in a small river near Reading
Will sometimes look up and wonder
Why his dark sad face no longer leans over them
And smiles as the float bobs under.

And the promoters of a famous football pool
Receiving no answer to any
Of their constant solicitations, will they guess
Death has taken that penny?

For now the aggrandising and first dignity
Has turned to stone
That quiet and dark young man, and he lies for ever
In a grave that will never be known.

GEORGE BARKER (1953)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "After Millay" by Bruce Smith, click here.

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