Cycling Poems / Literature

I was inspired to find this again after reading the thread started by lucky7 - the best poem I have ever read about cycling, and the experience of cycling, and if anyone can read it and not feel like they want to get out there on two wheels - well, they've probably never learned to ride a bike.

Does anyone else have any favourite bits of cycle writing?
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The Cyclist (by Louis Macneice)
Freewheeling down the escarpment past the unpassing horse
Blazoned in chalk the wind he causes in passing
Cools the sweat of his neck, making him one with the sky,
In the heat of the handlebars he grasps the summer
Being a boy and to-day a parenthesis
Between the horizon’s brackets; the main sentence
Is to be picked up later but these five minutes
Are all to-day and summer. The dragonfly
Rises without take-off, horizontal,
Underlining itself in a sliver of peacock light.

And glaring, glaring white
The horse on the down moves within his brackets,
The grass boils with grasshoppers, a pebble
Scutters from under the wheel and all this country
Is spattered white with boys riding their heat-wave,
Feet on a narrow plank and hair thrown back

And a surf of dust beneath them. Summer, summer —
They chase it with butterfly nets or strike it into the deep
In a little red ball or gulp it lathered with cream
Or drink it through closed eyelids; until the bell
Left-right-left gives his forgotten sentence
And reaching the valley the boy must pedal again
Left-right-left but meanwhile
For ten seconds more can move as the horse in the chalk
Moves unbeginningly calmly
Calmly regardless of tenses and final clauses
Calmly unendingly moves.

Right, I'm off to work now (on my bike)

Great post, louis macneice is amazing. i really like 'meeting point' (google 'time was away and somewhere else' and 'stargazer'. he also wrote this, possibly my favourite poem:

I do not want to be reflective any more
Envying and despising unreflective things
Finding pathos in dogs and undeveloped handwriting
And young girls doing their hair and all the castles of sand
Flushed by the children's bedtime, level with the shore.

The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

There's a commentary on it somewhere on the net where the cycling boy is described as 'freewheeling' down the hill but at the time the boy was almost certainly on a fixed gear bike - hence putting his feet on a 'narrow plank' on the frame whist going downhill to take full advantage of gravity until reaching the bottom and pedalling again.

I thought of a poem last night in bed:

I ride with a fixed gear,
I go fast and I drink beer,
In twenty years time I'll need robocop knees,
You say "fancy a ride?" and I'll say "yes please"

you fucking literary legend.

Bicycle bicycle bicycle
I want to ride my bicycle bicycle bicycle

I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride my bike
I want to ride my bicycle
I want to ride it where I like

L'enfer du Nord: Paris - Roubaix
Tour de France, Tour de France
La Cote d'Azur et Saint Tropez
Tour de France, Tour de France
Les Alpes et les Pyrennees
Tour de France, Tour de France
Derniere etape Champs-Elysees
Tour de France, Tour de France

Le peloton est regroupe
Camaraderie et amitie...

My name is Mike
I've got a bike

The End

He's a dangerous man from Uzbekistan
He is the Tashkent Terror and I can't say fairer
And he don't give a fuck coz he took too many drugs
And I love him very much, we try to keep in touch

Abdoujaparov Abdoujaparov Abdoujaparov Abdoujaparov

So here's my new band with a great new sound
Abdoujaparov Abdoujaparov
And we carry his name like a 531 frame
Abdoujaparov Abdoujaparov

We sing it from our knees and we sing it from the trees
Abdoujaparov Abdoujaparov
And you know you can't announce it , you probably can't pronounce it
Abdoujaparov Abdoujaparov

etc

I think I've posted this somewhere before, but these lines from 'Or Down You Fall' by (the legend that is) Gil Scott-Heron MUST have been written about riding fixed:

I ride my horse of nuts and bolts
We're made to never tire

The world is just a simple circle
I've got to keep on turning, yeah
I've got to keep on turning
Or down you fall

for higher quality easier to read picture go here.

http://emoxfag.deviantart.com/art/Polaroid-Bike-87039542

There was a young German called Blix
Who, when asked how he rode, replied "Fixed:
No freewheel, one gear
No De-railly-ears
Without them I can do far more tricks."

I cycled lonely as a cloud
That rides on high o'er ben and glen,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of worldly audax men;
Along the road, in search of rest,
Climbing and descending towards Brest.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Towards the coast of Brittany:
A thousand saw I at a glance,
Fill the roads of western France.

The crowds on road sides cheered; but they
Out-did the local crowds in glee:
A poet could not but be proud,
In such a friendly happy crowd:
I gazed--still dazed--but little thought
What joy the ride to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure grows,
And dances with our French heroes.

^One big +
for Titivulus

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsichord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve speed bike.

extract from "Machines", by Michael Donaghy (1954-2004)

A boy rides a bicycle before the first world war. He is eighteen,
almost nineteen - a man, really - and wears his new uniform with
pride. He is cycling along an embankment on the outskirts of a
small town. The sun is halfway towards noon, the wind tousling his
light brown hair; his pinkish lips are mouthing a music-hall ditty
under his sparse moustache. He is going to see a girl he used to
know.

He has no idea he will be dead in a week, his legs thrown out the
wrong way under a snarl of barbed wire. Now he marvels at the
warmth of his muscles as the chain drives the wheels around. Now
his tongue tastes of mint and apples.

"Boy On A Bicycle" - James Roderick Burns

I’m dying to go to London
With a camera on my head
To film my final moments
As a trucker knocks me dead

I’m dying to ride the thin blue line
Super-Highway to Hell
Around the roundabout at Bow
Where two cyclists fell

I’m dying to go to Holborn
Where they shunt us front behind
And grind us in the gutter
And leave us dead or blind

I’m dying to be a victim
That Boris Johnson can blame
I’d hate to run that red light
And live, but live in shame.
(not my own work but worth a share)

http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/WheelmenFeathered.jpg“Your lady correspondent ‘Madeline’ takes a very rosy view of the bicycle and its riders, which makes me believe she looks wholly from the outside. She may be a married lady ; but if so her husband doesn’t ride the bicycle, as mine does.

It is a very pretty sight to see a row of riders glide by on their silent wheels, as ‘Madeline’ describes them, and if the experience ends when the bicycles pass out of sight there is nothing but pleasure in it; but when a woman has to live day after day with a bicycle rider, she soon learns what a nuisance the ‘wheel’ is.

“When my husband comes home from a ‘run,’ as he calls it, he…raises a terrible row if supper isn’t ready, and the way he eats would make a coal-heaver envious.

Then he drags his dirty old wheel through the house, leaving his oily finger-marks on all the door-knobs, and shouts out to me that he has burst the buttons off his knee-breeches or torn a hole in his stockings, and I must drop everything and fix him up in decent order. Every few weeks he has to buy a new uniform, because ‘the club’ has voted to change it.

“Every one of these uniforms is more horrid in color and cut than the one before it, but he keeps on buying them, and I can’t get half the dresses that I am actually suffering for. As for the club meetings, I never could see what they were for, except to change the uniform, as I hear nothing else about them, though there must be a good deal of discussion about it, for they are held almost every other night.

“Before my husband bought his bicycle, we used to make pleasure trips on Sundays to the cemetery, to see the grave of his mother-in-law; but now on summer Sundays there is always a ‘meet’ somewhere, and I don’t see him from morning till night.

I suppose he improves (?) the time by riding up and down in front of the windows of ‘Madeline,’ and other women who like such things; but if any fellow comes riding by my house, I always feel like setting the dog at him.

http://www.roadswerenotbuiltforcars.com/tingods/

One of Betjeman's minor works:

I sometimes think that I should like
To be the saddle of a bike.

A theme he returned to:

Kind o’er the kinderbank leans my Myfanwy,
White o’er the playpen the sheen of her dress,
Fresh from the bathroom and soft in the nursery
Soap scented fingers I long to caress.

Were you a prefect and head of your dormit'ry?
Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym?
Who was your favourite? Who had a crush on you?
Which were the baths where they taught you to swim?

Smooth down the Avenue glitters the bicycle,
Black-stockinged legs under navy blue serge,
Home and Colonial, Star, International,
Balancing bicycle leant on the verge.

Trace me your wheel-tracks, you fortunate bicycle,
Out of the shopping and into the dark,
Back down the avenue, back to the pottingshed,
Back to the house on the fringe of the park.

Golden the light on the locks of Myfanwy,
Golden the light on the book on her knee,
Finger marked pages of Rackham's Hans Anderson,
Time for the children to come down to tea.

Oh! Fullers angel-cake, Robertson’s marmalade,
Liberty lampshade, come shine on us all,
My! what a spread for the friends of Myfanwy,
Some in the alcove and some in the hall.

Then what sardines in half-lighted passages!
Locking of fingers in long hide-and-seek.
You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy,
Ring leader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.
John Betjeman

Haha yes, there is also "Senex" too - a far darker if also humorous slice of bicycle related Betjeman. He was a regular cycle tourist in his younger days (hence his description of St Wendreda's church, March, as "worth cycling 40 miles into a headwind to see").

Bicycles and repression, very English.

...Bicycles and repression, very English.
Solitude and silence are good for mournful reflection: perhaps that's why the Continentals prefer group riding, where as we've made time trialling our own?