Two Poems by Elizabeth Jennings
Poetry Nation 1, 1973
Roman Poets
Those Roman poets had their dignity
Despite the sordidness, the greed,
The desire and need
For vomitoria.
Yes, they had their dignity
Hidden in their poems,
Under cypresses.
They had their mistresses
And gave them immortality
In poems proof against time and taste.
The Romans gave us law,
Like a building placed
Not by God's hands but man's,
An expanse
Of intricate arguments,
Always authority
In the shadows of cypresses.
A Love Poem
You want, you need, you long to live
But words are muddled when you say
'I love you'; there has been delay
In what I hoped that I could give.
Silence is love, or just a glance,
Meeting of eyes, meeting of hands.
Each knows the other understands
Each thinks that none of this is chance.
Elizabeth Jennings was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1926, and lived most of her life in Oxford, where she moved in 1932. She was educated at Rye St Antony and Oxford High School before reading English at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she began a B.Litt., but left to pursue a career in copy-editing in London. Returning to Oxford to take up a full-time post as a librarian at the city library, Jennings worked briefly at Chatto and Windus before becoming a full-time poet.
Her second volume of poetry, A Way of Looking (1955), won the Somerset Maugham Award, which allowed her to travel to Rome, a city which had an immense impact on her poetry and Roman Catholic faith. While she suffered from physical and mental ill health from her early thirties, Jennings was a popular and widely read poet. She received the W.H. Smith award in 1987 for Collected Poems 1953–1985, and in 1992 was awarded a CBE. She died in 2001. New Selected Poems, edited by Rebecca Watts, was published in 2019.
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