This morning I read “Poem in October” by Dylan Thomas, a soaring, hymn-like poem. It’s a beautiful poem best heard read by Thomas himself, Richard Burton, or some other person with a resonant singsong Welsh voice. I’ll share that poem soon, but for now I want to share a different, much less grand poem, a funny poem that mocks poetry and the poet—and Thomas is easy to mock.

“Stabs in My Own Back” is a poem by the Scottish poet William Soutar (1898-1943). Soutar was one of the leading Scottish poets of the 20^th century, but despite my love for Scotland, my seven years in the country, and my personal contact with many Scottish poets (I was president of the Poetry Society at Edinburgh University, or at least I think I was), I’d never heard of Soutar—and I don’t know his poems.

I read the poem below in Soutar’s “Diaries of a Dying Man,” perhaps the work he is now best known for. Soutar spent some 15 years in bed, receiving visitors, writing, reflecting, and dying. He wrote many other short, witty poems, some of which you can read here. https://briefpoems.wordpress.com/2024/07/07/thistles-brief-poems-by-william-soutar/ Although the poem is funny, it also says something about the impossibility of poetry.

Stabs in my own back

Soutar the poet used to lie

And watch the butterflies go by;

And with a mild, abstracted air

Unto himself he would declare:

“These are eternal thoughts: I watch ‘ em

But damn’d if I ever catch them.

Soutar the poet used to lie

And brood upon divinity;

Until, in meditative birth,

This aphorism was bodied forth:–

“God and humanity are one.”

He took his pen to write it down;

But, having heard the front door bell,

Shut his book and mutter’d “Hell.”