Walking in Brueton Park. As Keats might have said, ‘O what can ail thee, wretched wight, alone and palely loitering, the sedge has withered from the lake and no birds sing’
I was with C actually, so not alone, but still.
More reeds, sedge etc. etc.
I had one of those small lightbulb moments yesterday. No biggie – just the realisation that, after a life time of looking ahead to the next milestone – to be 10 years old, a teenager, qualified, married, a father, promoted, retired – at this age there’s only the destination left. And that’s ok.
And then I remembered that Philip Larkin had said as much and with far greater elegance in his early poem, Next Please:
Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it’s
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the lastWe think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
Anne Carson is one of the poets writing today that I most admire: for her huge intelligence, her unexpectedness, for the resonances – always present – with the classical world, and for the power and beauty of her words. There is no one like her.
I came across this verse of hers yesterday on Instagram. One reader’s comment was, simply, ‘Ooof!’ Which I thought was about right – the sadness and love and horror contained in these few words have a rare power.
Euridice is there of course, but she is not alone. Does Lot’s wife stand beside her? Does Dido?
gentle as a dead friend’s hand/ resting on my shoulder/ this autumn sunshine – Kusadao
#Istandwithcharlottemew God does too, if Revelations are to be believed:
—and he cried with a loud voice:
Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees—
(Revelation)They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.
For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall,
The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas,’ the loud common talk, the loud common laughs of the men, above it all.I remember one evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.
I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.The week’s work here is as good as done. There is just one bough
On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now!—)
And but for that,
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:
When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering
loveliness away
Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying—
But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
‘Hurt not the trees.’Charlotte Mew, “The Trees are Down” from Collected Poems and Prose (Manchester, England: Carcanet Press Ltd., 1981).
I came across this on Twitter – and thought it was terrific!
I’m guessing everyone knows this – but I only found it today, and it seemed like something I needed to read:
Think of those that marched this road before
And those that will march here in years to come
The road in shadow and the road in the sun
The road before us and the road all done
History is watching us and what will we becomeThere is power and strength in optimism
To have faith and to stay true to you
Because if you can look in the mirror
And have belief and promise you
Will share wonder in living things
Beauty, dreams, books and art
Love your neighbour and be kind
And have an open heartThen you’re already winning at living
You speak up, you show up and stand tall
It’s silence that is complicit
It’s apathy that hurts us all
Pessimism is for lightweightsThere is no straight white line
It’s the bumps and curves and obstacles
That make this time yours and mine
Pessimism is for lightweights
Pessimism is for lightweights
This road is never easy and straight
And living is all about living alive and lively
And love will conquer hate
It’s by Salena Godden – buy the book here
Just came across this lovely poem by Theodore Roethke:
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
Just treated myself to a copy of Julia Blackburn’s latest book, Timesong, Searching for Doggerland.
In the introduction she says,
I wonder if it makes sense to imagine infinity going backwards in time rather than forwards. When you look at it that way round, you no longer have the vague dread of what the future holds, instead there is the intimation of the enormity of everything that has gone before: a solemn procession of life in all its myriad forms moving steadily towards this present moment. You can almost hear the songs they are singing.
There is something else. My husband died a few years ago. He has vanished and yet he remains close, beneath the surface as it were, so perhaps I am also trying to catch a glimpse of him within the great jumble of everything else that has been lost from our sight.’
As an epigraph she quotes the last few lines of a poem by Charles Causley, called Eden Rock. I thought it was worth sharing the whole:
They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:
My father, twenty-five, in the same suit
Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack
Still two years old and trembling at his feet.
My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress
Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,
Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.
Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.
She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight
From an old H.P. sauce-bottle, a screw
Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out
The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.
The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.
My mother shades her eyes and looks my way
Over the drifted stream. My father spins
A stone along the water. Leisurely,
They beckon to me from the other bank.
I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!
Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’
I had not thought that it would be like this.
Charles Causley
Found this in the latest London Review of Books:
a boy's head 