IN A church garden, not far from the Ely home of Wendy Cope, sits a new bench complete with its own poem:
God bless the weary, may you find
Comfort here, and peace of mind.
The previous bench was hit by a car, which was inconvenient for Cope, now 79, as this had been a regular spot to rest her own weary body, after another tentative walk after having back surgery.
The vicar, delighted when her local poet offered to replace the bench, asked if she would also like to write a couplet to be engraved on it. “So, I did,” Cope smiles. “And now there’s a little gold plate on it with a poem by me. And I think, wow! I’ve got a memorial bench while I’m still alive.”
Not that Cope needs a bench to be remembered. As the Literary Review put it, she “writes poems that people want to read, and this is how poems survive”.
Still, on this side of the grave, poets survive on their royalties, and Cope was never one to hide her frustration at the sharing of her poems so widely online with no thought for her copyright — until, that is, she went viral herself.
Sitting in the book-lined living room of the house that she shares with her husband, Lachlan Mackinnon, also a poet, she recalls how, in 2023, “This TikTok thing happened, and it’s worked out incredibly well . . .”
“This TikTok thing” was when someone filmed themselves reading her poem “The Orange” to share on the social-media platform. That inspired someone else to video their reading, and the rest is social-media history.
Cope told Faber & Faber, her publisher, but they had already noticed (“They’ve got young people working there”), and, within months, a special edition was on the shelves — The Orange and Other Poems — which has since sold nearly 50,000 copies.
It has also brought Cope a whole new audience, captured by a staff review on the Waterstones website, extolling the “range of relatable emotions from the giddy sensation of falling in love to the heartbreak of losing a loved one”.
That Cope is “relatable” could not have come at a better time, as Faber were already preparing her Collected Poems, published in September. At her readings, she has noticed “a different demographic”.
“A friend of mine, a psychoanalyst, told me that one of his patients has even got a tattoo of ‘The Orange’.”
THIS is not the first time that Cope has known overnight success. Her 1986 debut collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, published while she was still a primary-school teacher, was a pre-internet precursor of a viral phenomenon. Some established poets were disdainful of its commercial success, watching as it eclipsed their own — an irritation compounded by the success of subsequent collections, such as Serious Concerns (1992).
Born in 1945, in Erith, Kent, she had parents who read poetry to her. Her mother sang in the church choir, and her father loved Gilbert and Sullivan, which may explain the rhythmic genius of much of her work. In another life, she might have written pop songs, albeit composing verse that was both light and dark at the same time.
Her work has sometimes been dismissed as old-fashioned. “Rhyme and meter never really went away,” she reflects, “but there was a feeling in some circles that this was an archaic way of writing.”
It was after studying history that she had became a schoolteacher, which might offer another clue to her popular appeal. If people are to enjoy poetry, she has argued, they need poems that they understand. But that was never a strategy, “just the way mine come out”.
“In the classroom, it’s your job to make yourself understood. If you can’t be understood, you can’t say, ‘Oh, they’re too stupid.’ I once heard a poet say that readers have to learn to embrace difficulty. Well, nine-year-olds aren’t going to do that. You have to find another way of putting it so they do understand.”
While poets may choose to be difficult, including some very good ones, “it’s no use regretting that nobody reads poetry if everybody is writing poetry that they can’t understand. A lot of people find poetry daunting.”
As a young woman, she had been living with depression and seeing a therapist, but, as she began to feel better, she found that making poems offered additional help.
“I was getting in touch with feelings I didn’t really know I had, which is what helps you get to what is behind the depression. And I had the impulse to write about how I was feeling. One of the first poems I wrote was about a tree, but it was about how I felt about the tree. I realised I had a right to say how I saw things in a way that I hadn’t before, and there’s nothing like that feeling. If you’re writing a poem and it’s going well, it’s a very good feeling.”
Her work often has a wry defiance, whether in writing about disappointment in love or the weird ways of men.
I expect you’re right, my dearest love
I expect you’re right, my friend
These boring arguments make no difference
To anything in the end.
(“Men And Their Boring Arguments”)
FAITH, its absence, the Church, its presence, have proved regular way stations in her writing. When she was nine, her “very Evangelical” mother took her to hear the American evangelist Billy Graham. “It was relayed to a local church. I felt that if I didn’t go forward and give myself to Jesus, I would go to hell. That was the feeling I got. A very upsetting experience.”
Later, her mother wrote about her to the Christian Union at Oxford, who “got me off to a Bible study on my first Saturday evening”. They recruited her for hospital services, where she didn’t mind the hymn-singing until she realised that the group had “targeted” someone well known as an atheist. “I’m quite prejudiced against Evangelicals,” she says.
But the rumour of the sacred hung about, notably in the cultural shelter of the great cathedral and its music and liturgy — experiences that find a pathway through the collected poems, even from her youth.
It’s a communion service
And I cannot go up
A doubter and a sinner
To take the silver cup. . .
(“Sunday Morning”)
Much later, after meeting Mackinnon and living in Winchester where he taught, she became a regular at cathedral evensong, “almost persuading myself that I believed it”.
She continues to almost persuade herself — for instance, inspired by a line of George Herbert, in her previously uncollected poem, “Teach Me”, about a cleaner, singing, while mopping the floor of a train station, “who makes the action fine . . . makes me aware In this unlikely place Of something in the world We could call God.”
Or another, also previously unpublished, after the death of Desmond Tutu:
Although I don’t believe in the after life
today I can’t help but imagine
the arch’s arrival in Paradise . . .
One of Cope’s strengths is her sense of mischief, making no exception for the great and good — for instance, in “On a Photograph of the Archbishop of Canterbury”:
You see an archbishop out jogging in shorts
You know it’s unfair to have negative thoughts. . .
Often overlooked for major prizes, her perspective is more prized than most at all kinds of public ceremonies. Both “The Vow” and “The Orange” are regulars at weddings, and she takes pride in how her work makes its way in the world, occasionally in unexpected ways. After Serious Concerns was published (“It’s funny but also miserable”), someone said to her, “Three of my friends left their husbands after they read your book.”
That was at a time when she was mainly wishing for her own husband, and her happiness in eventually finding him has changed her writing. They were together for 19 years before marrying in 2013. “I’m happily married, and that makes all the difference. And I’d like that to go on for as long as possible.”
She would never have predicted that “The Orange” would become her most popular poem, but she is happy that it has displaced the previous most popular, “Bloody Men”: “Bloody men are like bloody buses”. Her own favourite is “Flowers”.
The most memorable line in “The Orange” is the last: “I love you, I’m glad I exist.” This same thought (“I am glad to be alive”) finds its way into the final poem in her Collected Poems, “The End”, which makes reference to Psalm 23. Yes, she says, “I am grateful to be alive. I want to stay alive.”
And, apart from the church bench, has she some poetic epitaph in mind? She doesn’t dwell on what people will think about her work after she has gone; so, maybe, she says, just “Wendy Cope, poet.”
“Although Lachlan jokes that, because I’m very obsessed with copyright, my gravestone should say, ‘Wendy Cope, all rights reserved.’”