M’s poetry reading is one of Skyfall’s most gripping and memorable scenes, imbuing the film with a sense of what Winston Churchill would have termed ‘buggering on’. It also contains a tragic gay love story, mostly forgotten about (or hidden) for nearly 200 years.

Mention ‘Bond’ and ‘poetry’ in the same sentence and most fans will cite one of two scenes. The first, from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, has Tracy lowering Blofeld’s defences by deploying some well-chosen lines, giving her father and fiancé (Bond) the advantage they need to launch their attack. The second comes from Skyfall, with M using an extract from Tennyson to fend off a verbal attack from a Member of Parliament during a bureaucratic hearing. Unbeknownst to M, a more material threat is on its way in the shape of Silva - but so is Bond, the poetry underscoring his desperate efforts to get there in the nick of time to save the day.

It’s easy to see why these scenes stand out in our memories. Both are brilliant pieces of theatre that rely on the uniquely cinematic art of cross-cutting. Repeatedly moving away to shots of Bond in transit effectively timelocks the sequences: we know the poetry will cease and the firing will commence when 007 bursts onto the scene. Our anticipation is palpable. That the score cues underpinning the scenes are highlights of their respective soundtracks also doesn’t hurt.

But the scenes would not be so remarkable if the contrast - words, building to action - had not already been so well established by the poetry.

It’s notable that, in both cases, the words are spoken by women. And not just any women, but the principal Bond Girls of their respective films. In these scenes, Bond is positioned as the man of action. Although he’s often a very capable (and even cunning) linguist, he’s silent throughout both of these scenes, giving the poetry room to breathe on the soundtrack. For a minute or so, the women get to dominate the conversation for a change. Although in both cases, the words themselves were written by men - including some queer men.

These scenes are worth exploring not just because they stand out as different in their respective films - and in the franchise as a whole - but because they have an awful lot to say about how we think about many aspects of identity.

I have already dealt with Tracy’s ‘seduction’ of Blofeld (using poetry adapted by queer novelist Simon Raven) in depth here, so I will not repeat any of this material. As for Skyfall’s Tennyson scene, I am going to unpack this pivotal scene, exploring what it has to say about Britain’s place in the world today, a British mindset and the circumstances that tragic gay love story that led to the writing of the original poem in the early 19th Century.

From the Skyfall screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan — From the *Skyfall* screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and John Logan

To strive, to seek, to find…

It’s an eloquent scene in a film that is more explicitly intellectual than most Bond films. Whether that’s a good thing is up to each individual viewer. But it undeniably has a very British idea at its core.

David Thomson, one of cinema’s greatest critics saw it thus:

The film is hugely fun, but has a very serious theme: the place of tradition in the modern world… The central Tennyson quote by M is the key to the whole film (in case you missed the relevance of the Fighting Temarare by Turner earlier on). The reading I take from the film is as Tennyson says: time will give you a beating, but hold onto your history and traditions and they will steel you against anything that comes at you. That's exactly what James Bond does.

Thomson, a Brit who lives in the United States, went on to speculate about “how Americans react to the themes of tradition in the film”, particularly the Tennyson scene:

If putting that Tennyson speech into the mouth of one of our greatest living actors in the middle of our biggest cultural export isn't a statement about Britain, I don't know what is.

While I am personally very proud to be British, I eschew jingoism of any sort. I have taught myself (because I didn’t learn it at school) the history of the Empire and everything that goes with that - the good and the bad. I am very aware that a gulf exists between how we present ourselves as a nation and how we really are, especially when it comes to tolerance of difference. But we’re hardly alone when it comes to this. Some countries do a lot better, others far, far worse.

Bond is, and always has been, a statement of intent: how Britain wishes it was. And Bond is complex, enjoyably so, treading a fine line between earning our admiration and our condemnation. Just like Britain really.

Strong in will

If you surveyed a hundred people about what they associate with ‘Britain’, chances are that James Bond (“our biggest cultural export”) would be a popular response. Another would be a real person, a figure who, for many, embodies taking a beating and steeling yourself against anything that comes at you: Winston Churchill.

A 2002 poll from the BBC named Churchill ‘the greatest Briton’, due in large part to his efforts during the Second World War. Churchill’s birthplace (and final resting place), Blenheim Palace, was used as a shooting location in Spectre (supposedly a mansion outside Rome but clearly identifiable as the Palace to anyone who has been there). More explicitly, Fleming draws parallels between Churchill and M in the Bond novels, going as far as using the adjective ‘Churchillian’ (in the short story The Living Daylights) to describe his Miles Messervey character. In Skyfall, another M finishes her hearing testimony with a rhetorical flourish Churchill would have approved of. Her reading of part of Tennyson’s Ulysses poem is her attempt to justify the continuing existence of MI6 and, by extension, Britain as a whole. It’s her ‘fight them on the beaches’.

Like Bond, Churchill is a complex figure who had many admirable qualities but also his fair share of flaws. In the plus column, he loved poetry and dabbled with writing some himself as a young man. He also enjoyed committing it to memory and, perhaps boastfully, reciting it from heart.

But he was also capable of speaking very plainly. He was especially fond of the mantra ‘Keep Buggering On’, which he uttered whenever things got tough and implored others to follow his lead.

Here, ‘bugger’ is here not explicitly used in the sense of ‘to have anal intercourse with’ that had been in use in British English since at least the mid-16th Century when Henry VIII created the Buggery Act to make homosexuality illegal. The way Churchill intended it to be taken was in the sense of ‘keep doing whatever it takes to get the job done’, although the word ‘bugger’ (especially when used as a verb as Churchill does) did - and still does - carry the connotation of anal intercourse, something (it is assumed, on the part of the hearer) most people in polite society would perceive as an unpleasant perversion. Churchill was aware of the taboo nature of his favourite phrase and switched to Keep Plodding On when in the presence of a lady. Interestingly, it’s a lady M, Judi Dench’s in 2006’s Casino Royale, who describes underhanded villain Alex Demetrios as “slimy bugger”, a quintessentially Churchillian vocabulary choice. It’s also a quintessentially British choice.

Although Dench’s M claims not to have always been a fan of poetry and have come to it later in life, Churchill was very well versed, and cited Tennyson as one of his favourites. So what better poem to have M read in Skyfall than Tennyson’s Ulysses.

That which we are, we are

Very much an establishment figure in his own time and today, Tennyson’s poems, including Ulysses, the poem excerpted in Skyfall, regularly appear in school anthologies - the sure sign of being securely ensconced in the literary ‘canon’. And yet one of his most acclaimed works is a homoerotic eulogy (running to 90 pages in most editions!) for a man that many modern critics believe he may have had a romantic and/or sexual relationship with.

It’s frustratingly commonplace for queer history to be erased. Sometimes this is intentional but more often it’s accidental, with academics being hesitant to draw a conclusion about relationships, even when all the evidence points to two men (or two women) being more than just ‘best friends’.

You will commonly see the relationship between Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Henry Hallam framed in this way, despite the latter’s death being the most significant event of the former’s life, according to many, including Victorian literature expert Holly Furneaux. In a great article for the British Library, she suggests the lengthy eulogy Tennyson wrote for Hallam is so effective because it resists modern labels like ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual’, because the voice of the poem refuses “to be fixed or defined by the usual systems of marking identity”. A very queer poem indeed.

Is Tennyson’s queerness a reason why he’s a perfect fit for Bond? Right for the Fleming beginnings, Bond has always been both a part of the establishment and apart from it. He’s the ultimate insider-outsider. This is depicted beautifully in Skyfall, with him literally running against a backdrop of iconic London locations and waves of emergency services going in the opposite direction. The locations include Westminster Abbey, where Tennyson’s body is interred.

Gregory Tate, lecturer in Victorian literature, says that although “James Bond and Alfred Tennyson seem like an odd pairing”, the poem was chosen to “perfectly encapsulate” the loss of the Empire. Silva explicitly mentions he was M’s favourite agent in Hong Kong, right up to the 1997 handover when, presumably, things went very wrong for him. It’s a lament which also, paradoxically, conveys the impression that British power will endure - in the form of Bond: “In every film, no matter how outdated Bond is, he will strive, and seek, and find: Britain’s enemies will be defeated, and the plot will be resolved.”

Not yielding and finding a way to endure, no matter how mutable the world becomes around you, is a poetic and dramatic idea that runs through all of Bond, right back to Fleming re-building his readers’ post-war sense of identity.

Heroic hearts

Before launching into her reading of Tennyson’s Ulysses, M makes it clear that she is not usually the sort to quote - or even enjoy - poetry of any kind, explicitly distancing herself from (what the screenplay directions refer to as) “unwelcome” emotion. But she can’t help being moved by the words. They even begin to thaw the icy Clair Dowar, the MP chairing the committee, played to perfection by the late, great Helen McCrory.

It’s not clear whether M is lamenting the loss of the Empire, her job as head of British Intelligence or her husband. It’s probably all of the above.

Similarly, the sadness which infuses Tennyson’s Ulysses has autobiographical origins. Tennyson is ostensibly writing from the perspective of the Greek mythical hero Ulysses (a.k.a. Odysseus) coming towards the end of his life of adventuring. Ulysses is a very Bondian figure. In fact, I once saw a play adaptation of The Odyssey which recast all of Homer’s characters with characters from Bond. Unsurprisingly, Ulysses himself was 007. In one especially memorable scene he had to escape the treacherous sirens, here recast as beautiful Bad Bond Girls like Fiona Volpe and Xenia Onatopp.

In Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses cuts a curiously un-Hellenistic figure too. He refers to bequeathing to his son his “sceptre and the isle”, which echoes a line from Shakespeare’s play Richard II. In Shakespeare’s case, he was describing England - not Ithaca, the home of Ulysses. Tennyson was just writing about what he knew best - his own home. And like Ulysses in the poem, Tennyson does not feel comfortably ‘at home’, because there’s a hole in the centre of his life.

A few lines before the segment that appears in Skyfall (which is the very end of the poem) Ulysses almost looks forward to leaving behind his child and his wife (who barely warrants a mention besides being described as “aged”) so he can hurry up and get to the afterlife, where he hopes to see again “the great Achilles”, a fellow veteran of the Trojan War who fell in battle.

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Despite modern film adaptations of Greek myths straight-washing Achilles, readers of Homer would have taken his relationship with his ‘best friend’ Patroclus for granted as being romantic/sexual. A recent novel by classicist Madeleine Miller, The Song of Achilles, put the gayness back into the story with aplomb.

The Achilles of Tennyson’s poem is a thinly-coded reference to Arthur Henry Hallam. Ulysses was written only weeks after Hallam died, tragically, at the age of 22. Despite the poem bing written from the point of view of someone nearing the end of their life, Tennyson himself was only 24 when he wrote it, but he must have felt like his world was coming to its end.

Tennyson kept the poem to himself for nearly two decades, before finally making it available to the public in 1850. While he stopped short of revealing the precise nature of his relationship to Hallam, he acknowledged that extreme grief had shaped the poem:

“There is more about myself in Ulysses, which was written under the sense of loss and that all had gone by, but that still life must be fought out to the end. It was more written with the feeling of his loss upon me than many poems.”

Suffused with loss, the poem ends on a fragile, but optimistic, note: Ulysses/Tennyson finds the strength in his ‘heroic heart’ to ‘strive on’ and ‘not to yield’.

This is turned into something of a rallying call in Skyfall, M finishing her reading just as Silva shoots his way into the hearing room. M knows her days are numbered: professionally, if not also personally. When Silva shoves a gun in her face she doesn’t yield but stares him down, seemingly ready to accept her fate.

In real-life, Tennyson lived on, heartbroken, for a further 60 years.

The fragment of the poem which I always find most moving is

that which we are, we are

It’s a summing up of a whole lifetime and especially poignant considering it was written by a young man mourning his greatest love who was not able to do so more openly. In other words, he couldn’t be himself and had to live with that. For me, it also resonates with a song written 150 years later: queer anthem I Am What I Am, written by gay man Jerry Herman for the Broadway musical La Cages aux Folles. Although the song was made famous by Gloria Gaynor it’s a favourite of Bond singer Shirley Bassey and usually appeared in her sets, to much gay applause.

Keep buggering…

Would Churchill have been shocked to discover that Tennyson had been in love with a man and that this love inspired many of his most famous poems?

Buggery - of the homosexual variety - was not exactly a new topic around Churchill. After more than a thousand men were imprisoned for homosexual acts in 1954, Churchill’s cabinet met to discuss whether it should be descriminalised. Fearful of repercussions from the voting public, Churchill demured, although the meeting did result in the commissioning of the Wolfenden Report, which eventually led to partial descriminalisation in 1967. And although the surviving evidence is limited, some have used what remains to surmise that Churchill himself had relationships with men as well as women, some of which may have been sexual. He was apparently very tolerant of any MPs in his own party who were caught buggering on, often with soldiers.

So I think it’s unlikely that Churchill would have been shocked to learn the truth about Tennyson. Churchill was such a well-read scholar, it probably wouldn’t have been news to him anyway. And besides, what better example of Keep Buggering On than finding the strength to live on sixty years after the love of your life has passed away? Churchill would have considered Tennyson to be a credit to his nation, the epitome of Britishness.

…and carry on.

After hubbub of the hearing has subsided - poetry, gunfire and all - and Bond is in the process of squirreling M off to Scotland, the man who will soon be the new M shows that he might have the qualifications for the job, vocabulary and all. After discovering Tanner and Q secretly supporting 007, Mallory gives them his approval to get the job done, even if does mean they all risk being buggered by the Prime Minister. The things we do for Britain!

The truth about Tennyson: Britishness, ‘buggering on’ and the gay love poem at the heroic heart of Skyfall