It is a year since the first of these monthly poetry columns and I judge it time for a tea break. Ten Poems About Tea is the volume at hand: a mini-anthology, asking to be taken one sip at a time. It is delightful with an introduction by Sophie Dahl, who reminisces about her tea-drinking past and stirs in a pleasing spoonful of Chinese philosophy (Tien Yiheng: "Tea is drunk to forget the din of the world"). Thomas Hardy's "At Tea" is not a poem I had come across before and it is satisfying to discover he has compressed what could have made a solidly tragic novel into two stanzas. I am not sure I approve of the female guest who "sits smiling and sips her tea" and makes ingratiating comments on the decor ("never so sweet a room"), nor of the husband with the wandering eye and heart who "throws her a stray glance yearningly" while his wife believes herself happily married. And Hardy's kettle makes an off-putting noise a "cosy drone". But it is delicious to find this trio taking tea together, a literary curiosity with an unwritten moral: tea for two is safer.
Romance is going better at Carol Ann Duffy's tea table where more or less everything about tea comes with a frisson, although her love affair must be in its early stages since she does not appear to have grasped whether her beloved takes milk or sugar:
"I like the questions sugar? Milk?
And the answers I don't know by heart"
And then, in true Duffy style (rather as she lists, in her most famous poem "Prayer", names from the Shipping Forecast: "Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre") she here pours out, in a stream of delight, a register of teas:
"Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon."
Tiffany Atkinson meanwhile makes tea-taking sound suitable only for consenting adults. In her enjoyable and almost comically erotic "Tea", she does not tell her man, who is shaking rain from his jacket and making her tea, what she is thinking but she tells us: "You weren't to know how your touch/ with the teaspoon stirred me"
The anthology is the greatest fun: the afternoon equivalent of a pub crawl a tea-party totter in which each brew is different and the cast keeps changing. John Betjeman's charming, if slightly condescending, period piece "In a Bath Teashop" spies on an "ordinary" woman and a "thumping crook" who are, in their tea-drinking togetherness, "little lower than the angels/ In the teashop's ingle-nook". In Eavan Boland's contribution, "In Season", there is no living cast. She describes the two figures on her mug under the "odd azure of apple blossom" who are "going towards each other with hands outstretched". Their attempt at a hug is permanently frustrated. It is a poor man's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and that is its charm.
The anthology would not be complete without Jo Shapcott's "Procedure" from her Costa prize-winning collection Of Mutability, in which tea becomes a way of expressing gratitude at being alive. But there is also a less well known, exuberant poem by Kenny Knight, "Lessons in Tea-Making", which rejoices in a time when "the teapot was the centre of the known universe" and ends with this pleasing idea:
I read the tea leaves
as if they were words
left over from a conversation
between two cups
It is all enough to make one want to spring from one's desk, quoting John Agard under one's breath:
Put the kettle on
Put the kettle on
It is the British answer
To Armageddon.
Never mind taxes rise
Never mind trains are late
One thing you can be sure of
And that's the kettle mate
And perhaps that is the message for Hardy's deceived wife too.
