As worries grow over the cost of culture – barely a week goes by without an actor complaining about theatre ticket prices – one form of art remains absolutely free, in London at least. On the underground, there is still poetry, as there has been since 1986. The new verses for spring – this is the 116th set of poems – include the lovely Riches I hold in light esteem (also known as The Old Stoic) by Emily Brontë: scant lines about freedom and courage that may just make weary commuter eyes leak a little as the train clanks between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square.
I’ve always loved Poems on the Underground, a scheme supported by the Arts Council, among others. It is among the most important public art of my lifetime, running a close second to Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North. So when I heard its archive had arrived at Cambridge University, I took this as a long overdue acknowledgement – of its power, its scope, its high-minded ambition.
People talk about wellness, and to hear them is tiring and quite boring, too. What’s wonderful about Poems on the Underground is the ratio between investment and result. It takes only a minute to read each poem, at a moment when you’ve precious little else to do. Yet instantly you feel better: sometimes, I leave the train and run all the way up the escalator.
Among the items in its archive is a letter from Seamus Heaney to one of its masterminds, Judith Chernaik, in which he says that he’s sure it has made a difference “to the life-worth of poetry for many people”. Life-worth. He puts it so well. If the project ever came to an end – don’t imagine that the fool doesn’t exist who would make this cut – its loss (ironically) would be far beyond words.
False pretences
A school in Kent is to allow girls to wear false eyelashes “to protect their mental health”. Such leniency, I thought, when I first read of this. Let them leave their ridiculous hairy caterpillars at home! But age makes hypocrites of us all.
At 14, the prospect of appearing in public minus my electric blue eyeliner was utterly horrifying, to me and all my girlfriends. At school, we reapplied it every hour, at least. You kept a pencil – Rimmel or Boots’s 17 – permanently in your pocket, there to be whipped out behind Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the oven doors in the domestic science room, even the conical flask you’d just filled with sulphuric acid (a quick flip of your goggles, and it was done). Sometimes, a fast-flowing stream of many dozens of pupils would come to a sudden halt in the corridor, the cause of the blockage not a teacher, but a fourth-former carefully attending to her ultramarine kohl in the reflection of a classroom door’s stainless steel finger plate.
At odds over odes
More poetry. Having booked four tickets for the Gerard Manley Hopkins edition of Dead Poets Live at Wilton’s Music Hall in London this week, it has been weirdly heartening to find that this most idiosyncratic of Victorian writers still stirs such passion. “No!” shouted one friend at the merest suggestion of joining the party. His school-induced GMH post-traumatic stress disorder is apparently ongoing, 40 years after he left the place.
But others were ecstatic at the idea. “Intense,” wrote R, when I inquired after his feelings for Hopkins. “Fierce,” said C, asked the same question. So now we’re quorate. All that remains is to hope that the brazen email I sent to the organisers requesting Binsey Poplars (“My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled…”) did not fall on deaf ears.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
