‘He lived inside poetry’: Toby Jones and Helena Bonham Carter perform poems in memory of lost loved ones
Actors including Asa Butterfield, Stephen Mangan and Susan Wokoma share poems as part of ‘Celebration Day’, a new annual moment dedicated to commemorating family and friends
Ella Creamer and Lucy Knight
Wed 21 May 2025
Helena Bonham Carter, Toby Jones and Asa Butterfield are among actors performing poems in memory of family members and friends who are no longer with us, to mark Celebration Day later this month.
The initiative, conceived in 2022 by high-profile figures including Stephen Fry, Prue Leith, film director Oliver Parker and writer and poetry curator Allie Esiri, sets aside a day in the calendar each year to celebrate the lives of loved ones no longer with us, inspired by celebrations such as Mexico’s Day of the Dead. The first Celebration Day was held on 26 June 2022, and now it runs on the last bank holiday Monday in May, which this year will be 26 May.
Stephen Mangan, Nathaniel Parker and Susan Wokoma were also filmed reading poems at Abbey Road studios in London. The videos will be published exclusively on the Guardian website in the lead up to Celebration Day, with the first, which features Bonham Carter reading Don’t Let That Horse by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, available to watch today.
Wilfred Owen and Sheenagh Pugh are among the poets whose works were selected by the actors. Jones, known for his roles in Mr Bates vs the Post Office and Detectorists, picked Portrait of a Romantic by ASJ Tessimond, in memory of his father, who died a year after Jones introduced him to the poem.
Poems “were like clothing” to his father, said Jones – he “wanted to live inside” them, and memorised a number of them, including Portrait of a Romantic. “We decided to use the second stanza of this poem on his gravestone”, said Jones. “When I read the poem, inevitably I reflect on my Dad, and the huge influence he’s had on both what I do, and how I feel about what I do.”
Bonham Carter chose Don’t Let That Horse in memory of her grandmother, who was known as “Bubbles”. A painter who made “sort of fake Chagalls”, Bonham Carter described her grandmother as an “eternal child” who “always had a sense of play”.
‘An eternal child’ … Helena Bonham Carter holding a picture with her grandmother, Bubbles. Photograph: Rory Langdon-Down
“She died at 89, but frankly she never really grew older emotionally than about seven. A good reminder that no matter how serious it gets, you’ve got to remember to have fun.”
Lost loved ones “remain part of our fabric, our internal world”, the actor added. “We need permission to stop – a day in which we can invoke them and remember them, and let them live again through us.” After losing somebody, “you might lose what you were when you were with them. And that relationship needs to carry on, somehow”.
The actors worked with Esiri, who compiled 365 Poems for Life and A Poem for Every Day of the Year, to choose their poems. Most of us reach for poetry at significant moments in life, like weddings and funerals, because poems “help us express things that most of us find really difficult to express”, said Esiri.
The language of poetry “gives you a path when you’re suffering eviscerating feelings of grief and you’ve lost your hold on the earth and everything’s very very fractured”, she added. The “great poet gives you words, and it’s sort of like holding your hand across time”.
Star pin badges will be on sale at WH Smith stores until 27 June, with proceeds going to charities Mind, the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity, Make-A-Wish and Hospice UK. The public are encouraged to share memories of loved ones on social media using the hashtag #ShareYourStar.
Parker, who directed the videos, said the project “was a genuinely memorable experience”.
“Sometimes with a light touch, sometimes deeply moving, they are small, intimate acts of sharing, whether defiant, mournful or inspiring,” he said.
A Poem for Every Day of the Year by Allie Esiri (Pan Macmillan, £19.
The Harlem Renaissance poet brings classical craft to a pair of works reflecting on the ‘cultured hell’ of a black US citizen
Monday 2 June 2025
America
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth. Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate, Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, nor a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
America said …
America said: Now, we’ve left Europe’s soil With its deep national jealousies and hates, Its religious prejudices and turmoil. To build a better home within our gates. English and German, French, Italian, And Jew and Catholic and Protestant, Yes, every European, every man Is equal in this new abode, God grant.
And Africans were here as chattel slaves, But never considered human flesh and blood, Until their presence stirred the whites in waves To sweep beyond them, onward like a flood, To seek a greater freedom for their kind, Leaving the blacks still half-slaves, dumb and blind.
Written more than 20 years apart, these two sonnets by the Jamaica-born, Harlem Renaissance poet, novelist and political activist Claude McKay(1890-1948), take differently angled critical positions to their common subject, and emphasise a different poetics. In America (first published in the Liberator magazine in 1921) conflicted emotions take metaphorical shape: the sonnet has stylish literary manners. America said … (number 34 in a sequence, The Cycle, written around 1943 but only published posthumously) bears the strong trace of the poet’s earlier political thinking, although written after his conversion to Catholicism and scathing rejection of Marxist ideology. The pared style is almost journalistic compared with America.
The cruel betrayal of being fed the “bread of bitterness” by a maternal, female America, and subjected to the throat-wound of her “tiger’s tooth” forms the faintly biblical-sounding starting point for the earlier poem. Its development expands the verbal complexity. Still early on, the speaker “confesses” dramatically, “I love this cultured hell that tests my youth”. The brilliant oxymoron “cultured hell” inscribes the poet’s love-hate for America, and may suggest a nation’s “cultivated” hatred for his people. But the young poet’s invigoration becomes a moral testing that leads to calm self-possession “as a rebel fronts a king in state”: true civilisation is the ability to “stand within her walls with not a shred / Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer”. This line suggests the power of passive resistance, or resistance channelled into the creative accommodation of opposition via language.
McKay’s smooth deployment of the Shakespearean sonnet form and metre also makes room for its Romantic ancestry. Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandiasseems to haunt the gratifying vision of the decay of “bigness”, the physical collapse of an emblem of tyranny into “sand”, as the speaker looks at the future fall of America’s “granite wonders”. “Time’s unerring hand” prevails, in this sonnet, over the communist vision of the revolutionary dismantling of capitalism.
“Nonviolent passive resistance is effective as long as your opposition adheres to the same rules as you do,” Nelson Mandela wrote. “But if peaceful protest is met with violence, its efficacy is at an end. For me, nonviolence was not a moral principle but a strategy; there is no moral goodness in using an ineffective weapon.” America said … marks the despair of the weaponless, splicing octave from sestet, and separating theoretical New World idealism from brutal reality. The country, now, is ungendered, barely personified: although America “speaks” it is with a voice whose time is past, whose prayed-for vision of equality stays unrealised. Europeans become one exploitative “ruling class” in the sestet, inculpated by the shock of its opening line: “And Africans were here as chattel slaves …” It’s the Black presence that impels the “flood” of white power-seekers forward. The “greater freedom for their kind” is white freedom from the Black population, a freedom never to be shared.\\
Although the metre is loose at times, a five-stress (pentameter) line is sustained by the sonnet’s inherent vocalisation. For example, the third line, theoretically tricky to scan, is perfectly sayable with a rocking, oratorical movement around the five emphases. More variation is possible in scanning the last line. If “half” is stressed (“leaving the blacks still half-slaves, dumb and blind”) it’s as though the devalued humanity of a “slave” had been halved again. If slaves is also stressed, the line delivers a heavily drawn-out and almost weapon-raising conclusion.
America said … gains from being read alongside its neighbours. The whole 54-poem sequence isn’t readily accessible online; however, an 18-poem extract that includes the introductory “proem” is illuminating. McKay insists boldly on his new genre: a sonnet-guided personal-political autobiography. Form heightens the political passion of The Cycle sonnets, but the feeling “I” resonates above the literary voice and the meta-poetic, potentially revolutionary genre, the public speech, is ever-present.
Rhetorical pacing and cadence inform America, too, despite the more literary lexicon. Alongside the deeply absorbed influences of Petrarch, Shakespeare and Shelley, great orators such as Marcus Garvey make echoes in the deceptively small-looking, but rich and expansive sound-chamber of the McKay sonnet.
