Walking away

Walking Away

For Sean

By C. Day Lewis


It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day-
A sunny day with the leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.

I had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show-
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love proved in the letting go.

This was today's reading in a book of daily readings I have, it seemed good to share.

Mutterings - June 7

This week's free word associations from Unconscious mutterings are:

1. Daughter :: Clare
2. Intercom :: Button
3. Employee :: Paid(!)
4. Alter ego :: Dr Jekyll
5. Differences :: Integration (differences leads to differentiation)
6. Android :: Tablet
7. Leather :: Sofa
8. Angry :: Friend ('I was angry with my friend' Blake)
9. Remote :: Spot
10. Strange :: Meeting (Wilfred Owen)

A few poetic and literary connections here!

Teaser Tuesday - Jan 20

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

A little late again!

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.

Anne Bradstreet 'To My Dear and Loving Husband' from Poems to Learn by Heart - Ana Sampson. Here's a piece on the Bradstreet poem. The Sampson anthology is our book group book of the month, it contains a lot that's very familiar but also some rarer items. Here's an interview with Sampson.

Prayer

This poem by Carol Ann Duffy seems appropriate with the debate about an advert containing the Lord's prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, a small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, a radio's prayer —
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

It was quoted in a piece for Remembrance in a Guardian earlier this month.

Teaser Tuesday -Nov 17

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

It is now William who is stepping into the sunset and Dorothy who has lost direction, looking behind her as she goes. She writes up the honeymoon as is she were feeling her way back into herself.

A final teaser from The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth' by Frances Wilson. I said last time I teased from this book that I was finding it very hard going. I found the final 3 chapters a lot easier. Maybe I was getting into the style but it did feel as if there were more of a narrative thread I could get a handle on towards the end. The honeymoon was that of William and Mary Wordsworth, Dorothy was 'just' an onlooker. I was reading in parallel with this the short stories of Somerset Maugham and it was spooky to be reading his tale the Bookbag alongside this (totally coincidentally!) which deals with a tale of brother sister incest told in the light of the probable relationship between Lord Byron and his sister!

Teaser Tuesday - Oct 27

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

There is also, Liveing says, a form of migraine 'trance' in which the sufferer feels a drowsiness so extreme that he falls into a waking sleep or a living death. Dorothy described to Jane back in her Forncett days how she was unable to deal with the tiredness that came on with her headaches, being 'less able to support any fatigue and ... more troubled with headache than I ever remember to have been'.

From our BATS (book group) book of the month - The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth' by Frances Wilson. It's described as a biography of Dorothy, there's an awful lot of digging into the psyche, and I'm currently finding it hard going (and I'm not alone!). Here's an extract, she quotes this -

Ernest de Selincourt's describes Dorothy as 'probably the most remarkable and the most distinguished of English prose writers who never wrote a line for the general public'.

and the Guardian review.

Christmas Trees

Just to be unseasonal for a moment. I've just completed a read of Geoffrey Hill's Selected poems and wanted to quote this one.“Christmas Trees”

Bonhoeffer in his skylit cell
bleached by the flares’ candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,

restores the broken themes of praise,
encourages our borrowed days,
by logic of his sacrifice.

Against wild reasons of the state
his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.

Reminiscent of Bonhoeffer's Night Voices from Tegel, questioning the state...

The Interrogation

But the financiers will ask
In that day: Is it not better
To leave broken bank balances
Behind than broken heads?

And Christ recognizing the
New warriors will feel breaching
His healed side their terrible
Pencil and the haemorrhage of its figures.

R S Thomas

I'm talking about Thomas in a prayer group tomorrow and this poem seems apposite for the week.

Kabul on the television - '91

I've been re-reading 'Pushing The Boat Out' an anthology of poetry edited by Kathy Galloway, and came across this poem of Alyson Hallett:

Young boy vomits blood
sees camera sings
us a song 'one by
one the petals fall'

His thigh fits in a circle
of finger and thumb
lips held tight
with smile of death

Children wake old
limbs of women grow
cold, amputated,
men pull tears, triggers

Empty shrapnel full
bellies groan
bloody fingers clasp
shredded flesh close

In the shells
of heart and home
cries of leave
us in peace.

At a time when the intention is for UK troops to pull out of Afghanistan, I think this is relevant again. The 91 in the title of the poem is of course 1991.

Teaser Tuesday - Feb 12

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

When first thy sweet and gracious eye
Vouchsaf'd ev'n in the midst of youth and night
To look upon me, who before did lie
         Weltring in sinne ;
I felt a sugred strange delight,
Passing all cordials made by any art,
Bedew, embalme, and overrunne my heart,
         And take it in.

Since that time many a bitter storm
My soul hath felt, ev'n able to destroy,
Had the malicious and ill-meaning harm
         His swing and sway :
But still thy sweet originall joy
Sprung from thine eye, did work within my soul,
And surging griefs, when they grew bold, controll,
          And got the day.

Two sentences saying so much! I was tempted to include the final stanza but that's another two sentences - read the whole poem here. George Herbert's The Glance - from my edition 'The English Poems of George Herbert' ed. Patrides - our contemplative prayer group looked at Herbert's poetry last Sunday so I thought a read of this might be good. A culinary sugared influence for Shrove Tuesday.

Teaser Tuesday - Jan 8

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

George had met Stokes once before, in Cambridge, when they'd all gone out in a punt, Cecil clearly exciting his guest by his lordly thrust and toss of the pole and the intermittent recital of sonnets. Stokes seemed not to remember that George had been of the party, and George didn't remind him, when the talk turned to their Cambridge days.

Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child for which there was an earlier teaser last week. A carefully chosen extract....

Teaser Tuesday - Jan 1

Teaser Tuesday
The rules are:

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) 'teaser' sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title and author of the book that you’re getting your 'teaser' from .. that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given!

Was this it, the sudden helpless breaking of the news? Perhaps not or George would have said something more.

Having finished our current book group book of the month on society around the first World War, I'm now starting another - though more time elapses in this - Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child. Myth and memory - reflections over the course of the 20th century, it's a long read but I've enjoyed most of his novels - here's the Guardian's review, and here's another from a blogger. I see the Independent review compares it to Middlemarch, maybe I should suggest it for our book group?

Cocktail Music

In the evenings I'm currently slowly reading my way through an anthology of the poetry of Chase Twichell - I've quoted her before here - I found a large anthology of her poetry at the Oxfam in Alderley Edge a few months ago. This poem seemed especially appropriate as, the evening I read it, we'd just returned from an evening which started with contemplative prayer and ended with a cocktail party (at the same place!) - note the initials of both events! Twichell has made a close study of Zen Buddhism and her poems reflect that.

         Cocktail Music

All my life a brook of voices
has run in my ears,
many separate instruments
tuning and playing, tuning.
It's cocktail music,
the sound of my parents
in their thirties,
glass-lined ice bucket loaded
and reloaded but no one tending bar,
little paper napkins, cigarettes,
kids passing hors d'oeuvres.
It's drinking music,
riffle of water over stones,
ice in glasses, rise and fall
of many voices touching-
that music. Husbands grilling meat,
squirting the fire to keep it down,
a joke erupting, bird voices snipping
at something secret by the bar.
It's all the voices collapsed
into one voice,
urgent and muscled like a river
then lowered as in a drought,
but never gone. It's the background.
When I lift the shell to my ear
it's in there.

(from Dog Language)
And here she is reading Negligent Worldicide (from Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been)

An African Elegy

We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.
We are precious.
And one day our suffering
Will turn into the wonders of the earth.

There are things that burn me now
Which turn golden when I am happy.
Do you see the mystery of our pain?
That we bear the poverty
And are able to sing and dream sweet things.

And that we never curse the air when it is warm
Or the fruit when it tastes so good
Or the lights that bounce gently on the waters?
We bless the things even in our pain.
We bless them in silence.

That is why our music is so sweet.
It makes the air remember.
There are secret miracles at work
That only Time will bring forth.
I too have heard the dead singing.

And they tell me that
This life is good
They tell me to live it gently
With fire, and always with hope.
There is wonder here

And there is surprise
In everything the unseen moves.
The ocean is full of songs.
The sky is not an enemy.
Destiny is our friend.

Ben Okri

A clipped out copy of this poem has been around my work room for a few years, I found an electronic copy here together with other examples of his work.

The seed of change

Cold pavement indeed
the night you died,
murdered;
but the airborne drop of blood
from your wound
was a seed
your mother sewed
into hard ground –
your life's length doubled,
unlived, stilled,
till one flower, thorned,
bloomed
in her hand,
love's just blade.

Stephen Lawrence by Carol Ann Duffy from the Guardian

The Window

Say he is any man
anywhere set before the shop window
of life, full of comestibles
and jewels; to put out his hand
is to come against
glass; to break it is
to injure himself.

                     Shall he turn
poet and acquire them
in the imagination, gospeller
and extol himself for his abstention
from them?

                     What is he is not
called? I would put the manufacturers
there. Let them see the eyes
staring in, be splashed with the blood
of the shop-breakers; let them live
on the poet's diet, on the pocket-money
of the priest.

                     I see the blinds
going down in Europe, over the
whole world: the rich with everything to
sell, the poor with nothing to buy it with.

R S Thomas (Experimenting With An Amen 1986)
I'm reading this book - I'd missed out seeing this volume before and I was struck by Thomas' view of an acquisitive society. Particularly after this summer - in the UK - of riots and looting. Shall we offer pretence, a substitute for that which cannot be afforded?

Snow Light

Chase Twichell's Snow Light

I stop, winded, the air sifting down.
Here is the peculiar light I hoped for.
The branches of the pines are lobed with snow,
each shape intact, and brightened from within.

I walked among these flickering trunks in fall,
the grass grown stiff and noisy underfoot,
and found a mystery, a tree, a flowering quince,
all pale and fragrant, out of season.

It gave off this light.
What is holy is earth's unearthliness.
Love, could we describe it,
would break apart, lucency and force.

A starling rasps from his white precinct.
Far back in the woods, the snow is falling again,
perhaps into your life. The wind returns
to chisel its drifts and ribbing.

Forgive the rounded burdens of the branches.
They do not suffer, suffused in this light.
They are not sorrows,
though that is the meaning we give them.

A little unseasonal but thoughtful and moving, from her collection Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been quoted on Carol Peter's poetry blog which is well worth a visit. (I've quoted Twichell's poetry before on this blog go and read some!)

Delvig, Delvig!

Now here's something Good Friday-ish, from Dmitri Shostakovich's bleakest Symphony - No 14 - it really is a song cycle on a series of poems around the theme of death, comes this setting of a poem by Küchelbecker.

Küchelbecker was a Russian poet who saw exile under one corrupt Russian regime, Shostakovich experienced constant harrassment from another corrupt - now Soviet regime. I'm sure there was some empathetic feeling in these words:

O Delvig, Delvig! What is the reward
for lofty deeds and poetry?
For talent what comfort is there
among villains and fools?

A cynical, old composer, but he, in the end draws something of a consolation in this setting.

Snowdrops

Snowdrops
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

The flowers have started to appear after the winter. As I've just listened to Ivor Gurney's wonderful setting of these lines of Edward Thomas, this picture seemed appropriate.

Snow

In the gloom of whiteness,
In the great silence of snow,
A child was sighing
And bitterly saying, 'Oh,
They have killed a white bird up there on her nest,
The down is fluttering from her breast!'
And still it fell through the dusky brightness
On the child crying for the bird of the snow.

Advent

St Paul's Macclesfield
Originally uploaded by rajmarshall

I took this photo when walking across Macclesfield this morning, in very cold weather, to a morning service. And for this day a few verses from Anne Ridler's Nothing is Lost

Nothing is lost, for all in love survive.
I lay my cheek against his sleeping limbs
To feel if he is warm, and touch in him
Those children whom no shawl could warm,
no arms, no grief, no longing could revive.

Thus what we see, or know,
Is only a tiny portion, at the best,
Of the life in which we share; an iceberg's crest
Our sunlit present, our partial sense,
With deep supporting multitudes below.