With Our Great Pleasure

Some of you will be newcomers to the poem and for the rest I hope it is a happy/sad reminder of its eternal truths, re-enacted in every single separation where love and care taking have been involved- in uncountable instances at every moment. WALKING AWAY For Sean It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day – A sunny day with 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 have had worse partings, but none that so ...

Don't ever expect that there will be a sugar coating on anything Ms Duffy writes - unless it is to disguise a centre of, let me think...... crunchy frog???  She reminds me of the line of Auden's 'the desires of the heart are crooked as corkscrews' in 'Death's Echo'. VALENTINE Not a red rose or a satin heart I give you an onion. It is a moon wrapped in brown paper. It promises light Like the careful undressing of love. Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief. I am trying to be truthful. Not a cute card or kissogram. I give you an onion Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are. Take it. Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring, If you like. Lethal. Its scent will cling to your fingers, Cling to your knife. Carol Ann Duffy

There is another perhaps more famous poem of the same title by Billy Collins which I have posted on an earlier blog but this is the first time for this one. Forgetfulness Forgetfulness is like a song, That freed from beat and measure, wanders. Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled, Outspread and motionless,  A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly. Forgetfulness is rain at night, Or an old house in a forest, - or a child. Forgetfulness is white, - white as a blasted tree, And it my stun the sybil into prophecy, Or bury the Gods. I can remember much forgetfulness. Hart Crane

Another poem from my commonplace book - dated 6th November 2004. I realize now that writing these poems down was an investment of some kind, trusting that they would increase in value with the passage of time - or at least not fluctuate like a bitcoin hidden down a mine.  Anyway I cash in another one in hoping it will find value with you. A DYING RACE The less I visit, the more I think myself back to your house I grow up in. The lane uncurled  through candlelit chestnuts discovers it standing four square, whitewashed unnaturally clear, as if it were shown to me by lightning. It's always the place I see, Not you. You're somewhere outside, waving goodbye where I left you a decade ago. I've even lost sight of losing you now; all I can find are the mossy steps you stood on - a visible loneliness. I'm living four counties away, and still I think of you driving south east each night to the ward where your wife is living. How long will it last? You...

The words came to mind after my good friend and former colleague Johann sent me this lovely delicate winter image from her travels last week up here in Cumbria. She is an ace photographer. I hope the words complement the image. I have two particular trees that have been immensely important to me. We regularly have a tree surgeon to look after the huge Ash tree at the bottom of the garden and dominates the view from the kitchen window. Over the years it has been a constant reassuring presence, symbol of protection and inspiration (a mirror of all sorts of projections of course) and deeply associated with its centrality in Viking Mythology as Yssgadril, their sacred tree that united both heaven and earth. The second most important tree is the Bonsai given to me by colleagues when I retired nearly nine years ago.  Its toughness and resilience have withstood even my sub-optimal care.  Looking out on the flurries of snow this afternoon, there is a part of it awa...

ST Coleridge has bounded into life for me these past few weeks, released from the pages of 'The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science" by Richard Holmes.  Holmes has written two other books on the man but there is enough material here to produce a luminous and lively impression of the extraordinary man that Coleridge was. And that age he lived in.  We  see him in his place at the Royal Society and the Royal Institution as well as with Humphrey Davy, Walter Scott and Wordsworth out for a blow on Helvellyn. When poets, writers and scientists were intensely interested in what each had to think and say and had no difficulties in accommodating the complementarity of different imaginative processes.  Coleridge was never limited in his ambition:"The Poet", he once said "is the man made to solve the riddle of the universe". I am not sure that is true - both poetic and scientific creativity rely on the alchemy of ...

It took me ages (and the purchase of a separate volume online) to realize that unlike his other slim volumes of poetry (Whitsun Weddings, High Windows etc), Larkin uses a line from a poem rather than the title of one of the poems for the title of the book. This then is from 'The Less Deceived' and I had it all along in 'Collected Poems' that Teresa got me in 1988. It needs no introduction really - about being careful what you wish for. I had always thought my Dad had made this one in a rare discussion about growing up, but I discover it was Shaw: There are two great tragedies in life. The first is to lose lose your heart's desire.  The second is to gain it. DECEPTIONS 'Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain my consciousness till the next morning I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was unconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt.' Mayhew, London Labour and the Lond...

It seems to have been a pretty long winter. Wasn't it one of the darkest ones on record someone said? Time to lighten up, let's go for it. Another poem from Larkin's last collection: 'The Less Deceived' SPRING Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings, Their children finger the awakened grass, Calmly a cloud stands, Calmly a bird sings, And, flashing like a dangled looking-glass, Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark, The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me, Threading my pursed-way across the park, An indigestible sterility. Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous, Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water, Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter; And those she has least use for see her best, Their paths grown craven and circuitous, Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest. Philip Larkin

This poem has a very close association with a specific place (and annual event) for me.  For the last (and best) years of my professional life, I worked from the Fairfield Clinic for twelve years.  At the end of January, coming out of the front door sometime after 5 o'clock, on clear evenings the chimneys and deep red brick upper floors of the houses across the road were brilliantly lit - above the laurel bush and thrush. as in the poem - and made me feel brilliantly alive and expectant for the new year ahead.  I dedicate the poem to all the doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, mental health workers and associated professionals who made the job so rewarding - if always challenging.  Thank you for your patience, understanding, indulgence, forgiveness - and all the companionship and fun.   COMING On longer evenings Light, chill and yellow, Bathes the serene Foreheads of houses. A thrush sings, Laurel-surrounded In the deep bare garden,...

No apologies for posting this again - I know I put it on my first blog twelve years ago - it is worth it. Musee des Beaux Arts About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on...

    Ok, it's not the first time I have posted this one on a blog but it might be new to someone out there,     Another poem I discovered in later childhood with that immediate sense of 'stickability' - something that would remain just below the surface of consciousness and memory to come back to the top with its accretions of associations and meanings throughout the rest of life. To be thought about, experienced and realized in some way.     At the centre of the poem is the all important notion and reality of psychological projection ('unless your soul sets them up in front of you') and its effect on how we see the world. Without this knowledge - and the capacity to withdraw and own one's projections - we can never grasp what autonomy or 'individuation' might mean; just who you are and what I might be.That is the work of a lifetime.        Ithaka as a worthwhile destination that demands the surrender of illusions.  ...

Another chance find from the Poetry Foundation... well worth a visit. SELF PORTRAIT I lived between my heart and my head, like a married couple who can't get along. I lived between my left arm, which is swift and sinister, and my right, which is righteous. I lived between a laugh and a scowl, and voted against myself, a two-party system. My left leg dawdled or danced along, my right cleaved to the straight and narrow. My left shoulder was like a stripper on vacation, my right stood upright as a Roman soldier. Let's just say that my left side was the organ donor and leave my private parts alone, but as for my eyes, which are two shades of brown, well, Dionysus, meet Apollo. Look at Eve raising her left eyebrow while Adam puts his right foot down. No one expected it to survive, but divorce seemed out of the question. I suppose my left hand and my right hand will be clasped over my chest in the coffin  and I'll ...

A good find on another winter Sunday - from the Poetry Foundation. Sorry I couldn't remove the highlighting. THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS Sundays too my father got up early  and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,  then with cracked hands that ached  from labor in the weekday weather made  banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.  I’d wake and hear the cold splintering,  breaking.   When  the rooms were warm, he’d call,  and slowly I would rise and dress,  fearing the chronic angers of that house,  Speaking indifferently to him,  who had  driven out the cold  and polished my good shoes as well.  What did I know, what did I know  of love’s  austere  and lonely offices? Robert Hayden

For everyone who has been out for a walk, long or short, to a peak or a pub, on this wonderful day..... CHAPLAINCY FELL WALK There is always one out in front With superior calves and experienced boots; Always a final pair to be waited for, Not saying much, pale, rather fat; And the holy ones in the middle, making it Their part to acclimatize the lonely and new, Introducing cinquefoil, heron, a view; And a stout one who giggles, uniting us In wonder at her unfaltering chokes; But alarming too. For what is she laughing at? And remote presence of hills; And the absence of you.

Another recent interesting stay in hospital for an emergency operation brings to mind this old favourite of Ms Fanthorpe's..... I know that Jill and Jo will be interested at least.... Don't we all imagine how much more of a success we could make of life if we started off with say, the best of seven decades of life experiences? That's nonsense in medicine - innocence, naive enthusiasm, a complete ignorance of the subjective suffering of patients, an astonishing capacity to dissociate from horrible circumstances, intolerable demands, pressures and expectations- all these are fundamental survival techniques for young medical and nursing professionals just to get through the working day - and the loneliest hours after visiting hour left to you and a hundred or so patients. It is very often like a war - but maybe in the right company, good colleagues, with the kindness, good will and forgiveness of one's patients (the best are those that, despite experience, keep coming b...

'The Journey of the Magi' is inseparable from the memory of my small hand in my Mother's as we would walk in icy fog and stillness out of Harriet St, down Hollings Road, left into Thornton Road, past the mill where she worked, past the hangman's house on Bilton Place, along City Road and Rebecca Street to midnight mass at St Patrick's RC Church in Bradford. With the contrast of a small patch of light around the crib within the vast darkness of the church, not far away the tortured Christ hangs in hyper-realistic agony contemplating the story of a death foretold. 'In my beginning is my end' The Church Fathers knew their dramatic lighting effects and how to make an insoluble claim on the spiritual imagination of small children.  I think of an adult trip many years later to prehistoric caves in the Pyrenees and the recapturing of that unbounded sense of awe, elation and some fear at the 20,000 year old paintings that were the focus of initiation of the yo...

I read this poem back during the summer and made a note on my smartphone to publish it, today, the first day of Advent. Mr Roberts is my poetry find of the year.  Although the poet has his own very distinct style and subjects he is clearly steeped in TS Eliot's metaphysics and concerns with mystery and the hidden. The 'wounded king on the forest floor' has to be the reappearance of Eliot's 'broken king' who appears in 'Little Gidding' the last of the 'Four Quartets'.  From 'Little Gidding', line 20:                If you came this way, Taking the route you would be likely to take, From the place you were likely to come from, If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness. It would be the same at the end of the journey, If you came at night like a broken king....... Eliot's king is of course Charles I, who visited the church at Little Gidding three times. Th...

Thanks to Mr P for sending me back to Hardy.  Here are three of my favourites. As far as the first is concerned, walking in Bradford city centre when I was in my early twenties, I experienced the shock as I glanced into a shop window and recognised my Dad's face walking along with me.  That was not such a welcome recognition as when once much later, after his death, he walked alongside me in a dream and his loving presence was extremely welcome and needed. If you have not heard of read 'The Ruined Maid' you might not know just how funny Hardy can be. HEREDITY I am the family face;  Flesh perishes, I live on,  Projecting trait and trace  Through time to times anon,  And leaping from place to place  Over oblivion.  The years-heired feature that can  In curve and voice and eye  Despise the human span  Of durance -- that is I;  The eternal thing in man,  That heeds no call to die  I AM THE ONE...

Thank you Jill for sending another Sheenagh Pugh poem. Much appreciated! TWO MILES BELOW Two miles below the light, bacteria live without sun, thrive on sulphur in a cave of radioactive rock, and, blind in the night of the ocean floor, molluscs that feed only on wood wait for wrecks. White tubeworms heap in snowdrifts around hydrothermal vents, at home in scalding heat. Lichens encroach on Antarctic valleys where no rain ever fell. There is nowhere life cannot take hold, nowhere so salt, so cold, so acid, but some chancer will be there, flourishing on bare stone, getting by, gleaning a sparse living from marine snow, scavenging light from translucent quartz, as if lack and hardship could do nothing but quicken it, this urge to cling on in the cracks of the world, or as if this world itself, so various, so not to be spared as it is, were the impetus never to leave it. Sheenagh Pugh From Short Days, Long Shadows (Seren, £9.99) Sheenagh Pugh