'They were married
And lived happily ever after.'
But before living happily ever after
They drove to Paddington Station
Where, acutely embarrassed, harassed
And harried;
Bruised by excessive jubilation
And suffering from strain
They got into a train
And, having settled themselves in a reserved carriage,
Sought relief, with jokes and nervous laughter,
From the sudden, frightening awareness of their marriage.
Caught in the web their fate had spun
They watched the suburbs sliding by,
Rows of small houses, neatly matched,
Safe, respectable, semi-detached;
Lines of gardens like pale green stripes,
Men in shirtsleeves smoking pipes
Making the most of a watery sun
In a watery English sky.
Then pollard windows and the landscape curving
Between high trees and under low grey bridges
Flowing through busy locks, looping and swerving
Past formal gardens bright with daffodils.
Further away the unpretentious hills
Rising in gentle, misty ridges,
Quiet, insular, and proud
Under their canopies of cloud.
Presently the silence between them broke,
Edward, tremulous in his new tweed suit
And Lavinia, pale beneath her violet toque,
Opened the picnic basket, lovingly packed
By loving hands only this morning –– No!
Those sardine sandwiches were neatly stacked
Lost centuries ago.
The pale, cold chicken, hard-boiled eggs and fruit
The cheese and biscuits and Madeira cake
Were all assembled in another life
Before 'I now pronounce you man and wife'
Had torn two sleepers suddenly awake
From all that hitherto had been a dream
And cruelly hurled
Both of them, shivering, into this sweeping stream
This alien, mutual unfamiliar world.
A little later, fortified by champagne
They sat, relaxed but disinclined to talk
Feeling the changing rhythms of the train
Bearing them onward through West Country towns
Outside in the half light, serene and still,
They saw the fading Somersetshire Downs
And, gleaming on the side of a smooth, long hill
A white horse carved in chalk.
Later still, in a flurry of rain
They arrived at their destination
And with panic gripping their hearts again
They drove from the noisy station
To a bright, impersonal double room
In the best hotel in Ilfracombe.
They opened the window and stared outside
At the outline of a curving bay,
At dark cliffs crouching in the spray
And wet sand bared by the falling tide.
The scudding clouds and the rain-furrowed sea
Mocked at their desperate chastity.
Inside the room the gas globes shed,
Contemptuous of their bridal night,
A hard, implacable yellow light
On a hard, implacable double bed.
The fluted mahogany looking-glass
Reflecting their prison of blazing brass,
Crude, unendurable, unkind.
And then, quite suddenly, with a blind
Instinctive gesture of loving grace,
She lifted her hand and touched his face.
Noël Coward was a creative phenomenon, a man who excelled at every artistic pursuit he turned his hand to including (but not limited to) acting, directing, the writing of more than thirty-five plays, the composition of dozens of songs and their accompanying lyrics, four screenplays, a very good comic novel, many excellent short stories and a great deal of verse. His verse is perhaps the least well known of his accomplishments and that is a pity because it is frequently as good as everything else he wrote, revealing a side of his nature –– as in the example quoted above –– that would appear to be at odds with the popular image of him as an effete, smooth-haired dandy, tossing off cutting quips and memorable bon mots like a latter day Oscar Wilde. There was much more to Coward than the urbane and witty persona he so carefully projected and it is in his verse, and the best of his short stories, that he most often succeeds in the difficult task of touching the reader's heart.
The writing of verse was a necessary daily activity to Coward, a task which afforded him the freedom to step outside his self-maintained boundaries as an artist and experiment. 'I find it quite fascinating to write at random,' he once confided to his diary, 'sometimes in rhyme, sometimes not. I am trying to discipline myself away from too much discipline, by which I mean that my experience and training in lyric writing has made me inclined to stick too closely to a rigid form. It is strange that technical accuracy should occasionally banish magic, but it does. The carefully rhymed verses, which I find very difficult not to do, are, on the whole, less effective and certainly less moving than the free ones. This writing of free verse, which I am enjoying so very much, is wonderful exercise for my mind and for my vocabulary.'
Coward's sense of enjoyment is immediately apparent in a poem like the one quoted above with its precisely chosen images of the English town and countryside and its affecting description of the train journey undertaken by a pair of nervous Edwardian newlyweds to reach their '…bright, impersonal double room / In the best hotel in Ilfracombe.' He makes us feel and share their apprehension and also their genuine but as yet unconsummated love for each other, movingly expressed by the final image of the bride silently reaching up to touch the face of her new husband in front of their '…hard, implacable double bed.' We are invested enough in their story to care what will happen to them and to feel, by the poem's end, that they will conquer their mutual awkwardness and go on to enjoy a satisfying married life together. The poem has the affective power of a short, perfectly constructed film, offering the reader a brief but revealing glimpse of a world in which sex before marriage was a scandalous idea to most middle-class couples like Edward in his stiff tweed suit and Lavinia in her brimless violet hat. Their anxiety feels real to us because it is and remains recognisably human, proving that, while Coward may not have considered himself a poet in the accepted sense of the term, he was perhaps a better one than he gave himself credit for being.
Use the link below to visit the website of British playwright, actor, director, composer, novelist, poet and raconteur extraordinaire NOËL COWARD:
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