"For the ashes of their parents and the temples of their gods": great moments of poems in the cinema

"I want every poem to rest on intensity."

I was reading

, by the great American nature poet Mary Oliver (Errata Naturae, 2022), when after underlining the phrase "how much hope we deposited in those summer days, under the clean, white, rushing clouds", I went to come up with the famous verse of Robert Frost (Olivier dedicates a chapter to the teacher) "nothing golden can remain".

I kept wondering where I had heard those words and all the wonderful poem that begins with the verse

until that last enduring line,

and which gives the composition its name.

And then I remembered: many years ago, in the movie

from Coppola.

It is a beautiful scene, the young Johnny (Ralph Macchio) and Ponyboy (C. Thomas Howell) are hiding in an abandoned church, and in a moment of dawn, enraptured by the splendid and melancholic beauty of the burning horizon that Johnny does not get Putting the exact words to it, Ponyboy recites Frost's poem, which becomes a metaphor for lives and innocences lost.

It is an example of how famous verses can slip into the cinema that merge with the images in a suggestive mixture that moves as unexpectedly as it is powerfully.

On some occasions, the poem is a revelation, you discover it for the first time or it touches you as it has never touched you before when inserted into a story.

There are many surprises, who would have thought that Macaulay said by Tom Cruise in a science fiction movie would sound so good to us, or that in another of the same genre the words of Dylan Thomas would take on such a moving meaning?

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“In cinema, the important thing is emotion”

What are the best moments of that verse-film fusion?

(Not including those of

of poets, which would be a bit of a cheat) The verses of Coleridge's

at the start of

“in Xanadu, Kublai Khan decreed the construction of a majestic mansion of pleasure”

marking the parallelism between the mughal and the tycoon?

Karen Blixen's (Meryl Streep) farewell to her late lover and safari companion Denys Finch-Hatton (Robert Redford), with the entire Rift Valley on stage, in Out of Africa, reading AE Housman's verses to a

man

(“Wise one who knows how to escape quickly from fields where glory does not last”, “and they will always discover a fresh garland between your curls”)?

Another farewell, that of John Hannah reading lines from Auden's

in

?

"He was my north, my south, my east, and my west, / my work week and my Sunday rest, my noon, my midnight, my speech, my song. / I thought love would last forever. I was wrong ”).

Childe Harold 's

Byron's (“There is a delight in the trackless woods and an ecstasy on the lonely shore”) and

Yeats's

?

Walt Whitman 's paradigmatic

in

Peter Weir's

The protagonists of 'Sophie's decision'.

Each one will have their own, and therefore many will be missing here, but these are some of my favorites.

The first, the initiation, was in 1972 in a

Western,

At one point in the film, at the beginning, the only survivor of a cavalry troop annihilated by the Cheyenne, the rookie Honus Gant (a very young Peter Strauss) recites before the mutilated bodies of his comrades, to the astonishment of his partner, the experienced Crest Marybelle Lee (unforgettable Candice Bergen), more concerned with her hat, a few verses from

, by Alfred Tennyson, chose her for the wasted horsemen in Balaclava, during the Crimean war.

“They didn't even have a reply, / theirs was not to reason why, / but to do and die.

/ In the Valley of Death / the six hundred rode, ”he declaims as if it were a funeral oration.

The relevance of the verses cannot be denied, of course.

With that scene, I discovered the poet and the poem.

And in two hours I went from being moved by the verses to seeing my feelings questioned when the massacre took place in the Indian camp by a cavalry regiment and the girl snapped at Honus among the bloody corpses of women and children: "Don't you have any beautiful verse, blue soldier?

In another unexpected genre, science fiction, much more recently I have found another of the verse-moments that have moved me the most.

In the captivating film by Christopher Nolan

(one of the most precious love stories between a man and his daughter; how difficult it is to express what a heart feels, even without quantum physics, black holes, event horizons and singularities gravitational), appear several times (once in the mouth of Professor Brand, Michael Caine) the famous verses of Dylan Thomas

("do not go gently into that good night").

They understand each other in the film, with its other chorus,

(“Rage, rage at the dying of the light”, which incidentally gave the title to

, George RR Martin's beautiful novel about the twilight world), as a metaphor for the desperate search through space for a place for dying humanity, but it has been suggested that Thomas related them to his father's agony which gives an even deeper meaning.

verses (which also appear in the

Solaris

2002) with the adventure in the unknown space, the relationship between the cosmonaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and his daughter Murph, and the music of Hans Zimmer causes an enormous emotional impact.

For many years I carried in my car a cassette tape of Dylan Thomas' verses read by Richard Burton (a Welshman like him) and alternating with the musical version made by John Cale (another Welshman) on his 1989 album Words for the

but in

those words come in a very special way.

I have stolen another moment of great emotion from my sister Graziella, a great fan of Emily Dickinson and

, the novel

by William Styron and Alan J. Pakula's faithful 1982 film version. In the film, following the novel, the lead couple — traumatized Polish Auschwitz survivor Sophie (Meryl Streep) and bipolar Jewish scientist Nathan (Kevin Kline) )—is especially marked by Dickinson Ample's poem

, which his young friend Stingo recites at the end before the lifeless bodies of the lovers: “Let the bed be wide / let it be made with care;

/ wait in it until the Final Judgment / serene and perfect”.

An image of 'Peggy Sue' getting married.

Sometimes the poem appears without warning, by surprise, to move us to the marrow.

In a film initially so uninclined to poetry as

(1990), about a World War II B-17 bomber, a member of his young crew recites during a break between two risky missions, none other than

by Yeats, passing it off as his own creation.

Of course, it is a very timely poem and leaves the companions even more depressed than they were: "I know that somewhere in the clouds / I have to find my destiny."

What to say about the encounter with

by Yeats himself (an update by the Irish poet of the classic

, by Ronsard) in

(Coppola, again), when the young

recites to the protagonist (Kathleen Turner) the so sad and beautiful verses

with love false or true, / But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you

only one loved your pilgrim soul in you / and loved the sadness of your changing face”.

It is hard not to follow: “When you lean towards the fire of the hearth, / regrets, a little sadly, the flight of Love / that up there walks in the mountains / and his face is hidden among a multitude of stars”.

And from love to horror, horror.

Has TS Elliot ever had a better read than in the wasteland of napalm-ravaged Vietnam?

In

(Coppola again), Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) recites in a sweaty shudder of sane madness

(a poem influenced in turn by Elliot's reading of

):

not here / There are no eyes here / In this valley of dying stars / In this hollow valley

this hollow valley / this broken jaw of our lost realms").

And Blake?, someone will ask.

We have it in

by Jarmusch, and in

, recited by the replicant Roy Batty, although his rain monologue is mostly remembered.

Blake also saw things you wouldn't believe, but it was in his soul and not beyond Orion.

From him, from Blake, Batty declaims some verses from

yes, change

to

Surprisingly, Blake's verses also come out in

.

Angelina Jolie reads: "To see the world in a grain of sand / and a sky in a wild flower / hold infinity in the palm of your hand / and eternity in an hour."

A still from 'Oblivion'.

We could go on like this for a long time, with the verse from Milton's

in

, by Elia Kazan,

affect Natalie Wood , or the lines “I am the master of my destiny

, / I am the captain of my soul” from

, by William Ernest Henley, the nuclear poem of the film… But we are going to put an end to the surprising association between

that more than honest science fiction film by Joseph Kosinski with Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman, and Thomas Macaulay, a British poet, historian and politician who is most appreciated for his poem

Dedicated to one of the mythical heroes of Ancient Rome, Publius Horace Cocles (which means one-eyed), and part of his popular collection

(1842).

The poem tells the story of Cocles standing alone defending a bridge against an entire enemy army, the Etruscans of King Porsenna.

He is an eternal symbol of courage and honor and I always have before my eyes on my desk an old print that illustrates the episode, to see if it inspires me.

“Like Horace on the bridge” has become a catchphrase when you face something against all hope,

that the British say and that it would be like “against all odds”.

in

, Cruise's character finds an old volume of Macaulay's work and reads the best-known part of the poem, story and lines that will serve as the

for his own act of courage at the end.

“Then spoke the brave Horatio, / the Captain of the Gate: / To every man on this earth / death comes sooner or later, / and how a man can die better / than facing fearsome enemies, / by the ashes of their fathers/ and the temples of their gods.”

Unforgettable.

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