During our research for different themes and features in Beyond, we often ran across poems or stories that were quoted to the point of overexposure. The poor little things sit here, there, and everywhere on the internet and in books, underlined and circled, quoted and highlighted, until they are almost torn and faded versions of what they were once meant to be.
While searching for writings on Hope for the issue, Possible Worlds, I would continually bump into Sometimes, a poem by Sheenagh Pugh. On her website, Pugh writes how she would gladly disown Sometimes, a work that she is consistently associated with but not overly proud of. When asked by readers why she doesn't like the poem, she replies:
I think most people read it wrong. When read carefully, it says sometimes things go right, but not that often, and usually only when people make some kind of effort in that direction. So it isn't blithely and unreasonably optimistic. But a lot of people read it that way, which means I didn't write it well enough - the writer can always make the readers see what he wants them to if he does the job right. Also I know, because language is my job, that I have written poems in which the use of language is simply a lot more interesting and imaginative than it is there. So it bugs me now and then that this is the only one a lot of people think I've ever written.
And later she explains further:
[The poem] featured in a BBC Radio 4 programme called The Secret Life of Poems. It has been used by several charities and political organisations, including Charter 88 (for refugees); it has been read during the Irish peace negotiations and in the South African parliament, has been set to music by several people and quoted in other books (most lately appearing in the autobiography of the man in the white suit, Martin Bell).
Despite all this, it wasn't necessarily political, nor is it about depression, though a lot of clinically depressed people think it is. It isn't even basically very optimistic. It was originally written about a sportsman who had a drug problem and it expressed the hope that he might eventually get over it - because things do go right sometimes, but not very often... But it isn't anywhere near skilful or subtle enough and I would cheerfully disown it, if people didn't now and then write to me saying it had helped them. By the way, you might also care to know that I originally wrote "the sun will sometimes melt a field of snow" (the sportsman's drug of choice was cocaine). But I mistyped "sorrow" for "snow" and then decided I liked that better. I believe in letting the keyboard join in the creative process now and then.
By the way, some people have asked "why the odd spelling of "muscatel" as "muscadel"? Because the line doesn't refer to muscatel grapes; it refers to grape hyacinths, little purple spring flowers which I've always known as "muscadel".
Oh and while we're at it, a small rant... I am sick of seeing versions of this on people's sites which are wrong not because of faulty memory but because they've been deliberately "adapted" for added political correctness or to simplify the vocabulary or grammar. I've seen "man" blithely changed to "woman" by people who apparently don't notice that this screws up the scansion (which to any writer is far more important than being PC). If you don't like it the way it is, then write your own, but don't "adapt" mine and then leave my name on it, because I can scan and I don't want people thinking otherwise! As you may know, I like fan fiction, but all honest fanfic writers include a disclaimer stressing that this is them, not the original.
Anyway, here's the text, and if you like it, I'm pleased for you, but I'd be more pleased if you liked something else better!
Sometimes
Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.
