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Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
@stevewh16944270
4:07 PM 16th March 2018
arts

Poem Of The Week: 'Let Me Die A Youngman's Death' By Roger McGough

 
Roger McGough
Roger McGough
Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death



Roger McGough's now almost institutional lack of credibility as a 'serious' poet continues to rankle, even after fifty five years at the coal face of scribbling. The poet's early published work, conceived, and often performed, in collaboration with the other 'Mersey Sound' writers - Adrian Henri and Brian Patten - was libertarian, caustically political, loving, and very funny. The foregrounding of working class poets gave native honesty, energy and humour to a form grown stale in the immediate postwar years.

And the poems chimed precisely with the optimistic and artistically hungry mood of the sixties. Playing to packed houses and enthusiastic audiences, the Liverpool poets were preaching to the converted. But the simplicity of the poetics, the reliance on easy laughs and snappy vernacular conceits, the 'everyman' address, upset the poetry establishment who perceived a failure of mandate both in the absence of interpretive complexity and lack of academic rigour. That none of the group had studied Eng. Lit. at university no doubt added to the 'shamelessness' of their stylistic accessibility, and corresponding popularity.

The 80 year old Roger McGough continues to play to full houses, and there is some irony in the fact of his overwhelming success still failing to garner the respect of many of his compeers: if poetry was evaluated solely on the strength of book sales, McGough would be assured of his place in the ivory tower.

The poetry is more reflective these days - McGough has recently written a version of 'Let Me Die a Youngman's Death' which is more commensurate with his age - but he has lost none of the vigour, or acerbic wit of his youth.

The original version, and our Poem of the Week, emerged in 1967 in the Spring of McGough's creative power, and it bears the indelible imprint of youthful vitality and of an unwillingness to accept the depredations of age.

Written in the form of a mantra, a simple and effortlessly jolly encomium to the art of going out with a bang , 'Let Me Die a Youngman's Death', gives notice of something fresh and gloriously unworkable, something unequivocally, hedonistically unstoppable, which was bound to appeal to the swathes of students who turned up in droves to hear him speak.

The poem is both of its time and, striking, as it does, a wilfully arch pose which communicates its rebellious energy, time transcending. And it discloses a context, a knowledge of earlier poetry, which throws a spanner at pre-conceptions. It conveys the attitude of defiance, if not the form, which so ignites Dylan Thomas' seminal 'Do not go gentle into that good night', and it locates an ideal vehicle for the expression of movement and fluidity in the kinds of compound term used so brilliantly by that much earlier purveyor of the protean, organic power of words, Gerard Manley Hopkins.

'Youngman', 'inbetween', 'holywater' and 'allnight' serve to confer a metrical jauntiness which is undoubtedly abetted by the singular lack of punctuation. The poet is at liberty here, riding the crest of a rolling wave which is, in turn, punctuated by the eye-catching flotsam of puns which give the poem breadth and body.

Writing to Philip Larkin in the 1970s - the two had shared a brief correspondence when McGough was a student at Hull during the older poet's early tenure as the university's Chief Librarian - Larkin replied by noting that McGough's books invariably gathered less dust than his own.

A supreme compliment coming from a feted member of the literary establishment whose own star was firmly in the ascendant after the publication of his final book of poems. And a testament to the power of accessible poetry to speak to everyman.