With Our Great Pleasure

I keep his 'Collected Poems' on my Kindle of course but yesterday I took the Penguin edition that Eleanor gave me a long time ago and it fell open at this poem. Inevitably it is a love poem, since no one else has ever written as well and as comprehensively about that particular matter. Do challenge ( with examples please!) that assertion. BROKEN NECK 'Some forty years or maybe more' Pronounced the radiologist,'you broke Your neck: that is to say, contrived to fracture Your sixth cervical vertebra - see here, The picture's clear - and between sixth and seventh Flattened this cartilage to uselessness: Hence rheumatism. Surely you recall Some incident? We all do foolish things While young, and obstinately laugh them off - Till they catch up with us in God's own time. Let me prescribe you a Swiss analgesic Which should at least.....'                           Love, I still laugh it off And all such Swiss m...

Thanks Martin for this poem.  You big softie. `Beattie is Three.` At the top of the stairs I ask for her hand.O.K. She gives it to me. How her fist fits my palm, A bunch of consolation. We take our time Down the steep carpet way As I wish silently That the stairs were endless. Eleanor - about three???

'Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal' - Eliot. As a preface to 'The Whitsun Weddings' I quote these lines from 'The Dry Salvages', the third poem of the 'Four Quartets' by TS Eliot.  It's not possible that Larkin wasn't influenced by those words even if only in the echoing of the powerful symbolic importance of the train as agent of transformation.  In  'Adelstrop'  , the journey taken a few weeks after Whitsun on 24th June 1914 the indelible impression made on Thomas paradoxically reminds us of the unprecedented transformations in his own life and the world around and beyond. I dare say that more than one student of English has written an essay on the genealogy of the 'train poem' Isn't it odd that this, the most frequently requested of Larkin's poems is so out of character being so optimistic - or at least leaving room for the hope that things might just work out alright.... From the 'Dry ...

Another great poem sent to me by Jill - many thanks! She describes Ms Clarke as the Poet Laureate of Wales. Will anyone contest that? Miracle On St David’s Day All you need to know about this poem is that it is a true story. It happened in the ’70s, and it took me years to find a way to write the poem. ‘ They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude’ (from ‘The Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth) An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed with daffodils. The sun treads the path among cedars and enormous oaks. It might be a country house, guests strolling, the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs. I am reading poetry to the insane. An old woman, interrupting, offers as many buckets of coal as I need. A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic on a good day, they tell me later. In a cage of first March sun a woman sits not listening, not feeling. In her neat clothes the woman is absent. A big, mild man is tenderly led to his...

My daughter Eleanor would have been nine or ten when I found this poem - an early fancy for me of what the future might possibly hold and later its complete fulfilment.  From the photograph you would be able to work out that I typed this out on an old 'Olympic' office typewriter, salvaged from the community trust offices where I went to work in 1990. The model without a 'spellcheck'. She will be popping home at the end of July from Spain.

These lines were tucked away in my commonplace book nearly thirty years ago- when they helped me to think about the responsibility I had just been entrusted with: the task of leading a working group to take school nursing and medical services in a new direction in our area. Leading my soldiers in the Army was no problem at all: they followed my every footstep with the most intense curiosity just to see what the bloody hell I was going to do next. School nurses would be a different kettle of fish. Tell them what to do and they would come up with any obstructive excuse: 'it's illegal'.... or 'it's immoral'. Trump would understand what a nuisance minions can be. Reading the passage again now, I have to think about what it is that 'leads' me to tap on this keyboard, pick up a paintbrush or my guitar. Or just get out of bed in the morning. Having long ago begat my children and fulfilled (more or less) any useful social or professional functions, it leaves ...

Thank you Johann for reminding me of 'Adelstrop' by Edward Thomas.  Incidentally this is an interesting programme by poet Mathew Hollis about  the friendship between Thomas and Robert Frost that encouraged Thomas to move from journalism to poetry - built upon the prose account of an epic bicycle ride: 'In Pursuit of Spring'. He died a hundred years ago on the first day of the Battle of Arras. Great wireless. ADELSTROP Yes, I remember Adlestrop --  The name, because one afternoon  Of heat the express-train drew up there  Unwontedly. It was late June.  The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.  No one left and no one came  On the bare platform. What I saw  Was Adlestrop -- only the name  And willows, willow-herb, and grass,  And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,  No whit less still and lonely fair  Than the high cloudlets in the sky.  And for that minute a blackbird sang  Close by, and round him, mistier...

Thanks Des for sending me what is most unlikely to be the last Auden on the blog. 'Spain' Yesterday all the past. The language of size Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion Of the counting-frame and the cromlech; Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates. Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards, The divination of water; yesterday the invention Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators. Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants, the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley, the chapel built in the forest; Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles; The trial of heretics among the columns of stone; Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns And the miraculous cure at the fountain; Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines, The construction of railwa...

Thank you Allan for being very quick off the mark with this superb Brian Patten poem. The first of many of your selections I hope.... ARMADA Long long ago  when everything I was told was believable  and the little I knew was less limited than now,  I stretched belly down on the grass beside a pond and to the far bank launched a child’s armada. A broken fortress of twigs,  The paper-tissue sails of galleons,  the water-logged branches of submarines –  all came to ruin and were on flame in that dusk-red pond.  And you, mother, stood behind me,  impatient to be going,  old at twenty-three, alone, thin overcoat flapping. How closely the past shadows us.  In a hospital a mile or so from that pond  I kneel beside your bed and, closing my eyes,  reach out across forty years to touch once more  that pond’s cool surface,  and it is your cool skin I’m touching;  for as on a pond a child’s paper...

Thank you Jill for this lovely poem by someone new to me - you are the first off the mark with a contribution. Sorry I couldn't copy the beautiful photograph that you also sent. I found the image 'Fellside Light', a painting by James Naughton that I thought was sympathetic to the words. Thanks again. The Light Fell by Owen Sheers The weather was confused all day so who can say why it was just then the light fell that way - the sun riding low, burnishing for a minute, no more, the tops of the hills against a curtain of cloud, ashen with rain and snow. Or why it was then the deer chose to show their faces, lift their heads from grazing, step near, pause before coming on again. ‘ Oh human life, mysterious,’ I heard a woman say, ‘not gone, oh no, not gone. There’s electrics you know. I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t believe it to be so.’ And as the light fell drew our eyes, a thinning seam of amber compressed between the land and sky, I could believe it too. ...

This was the first poem I remember: our class teacher Mr Sheehy, beating out the different rhythms for each verse with a ruler on his desk while the whole class chanted the words in unison. A very powerful awakening experience for an eight or nine year old.  The place names created such enchantment and romance too.  When I cross the Tyne on the train on Friday morning to meet Our Kid for the 'Magic Weekend' that final verse will spring to life again. For all these year I have never known what an amazing life that Masefield had.  The poem found posthumously at the end of the article is a terrific epitaph. Collier Ship 'Fulham' being loaded with Tyne coal, Dunstan Staithes, 1946