With Our Great Pleasure

Teresa bought me the Complete Poems twenty five years ago - a superb collection, I could select so many more to include here including his perhaps most famous poem 'Walking Away' which I have blogged at least once before and given to many friends over the years.  I didn't remember 'My Méséglise Way' when I was skimming the volume for the purpose of this post and realize that was because my first reading would have been before I had read 'In Search of Lost Time' and didn't know the reference. It is interesting that like 'Children Leaving Home' (first published posthumously) he wrote this poem towards the end of the life. In Proust, the Narrator as small boy, meets Gilberte, daughter of Charles and Odette Swann by the river that flows by the 'Méséglise Way' - it is an epiphany and the start of his 'sentimental education'. Not one to rush through a very, very good book, he meets her again three thousand pages or so down the line...

Roy - father of John Fuller - was something of a hero to me in the way that he went about his poetry. Probably when he died in 1991, I found out that he had written most of his work (rising at 5am) before he went off to work as a solicitor at the Woolwich Building Society. He had various jobs including a radar mechanic and an officer in the Royal Navy.  . At the last,he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford: I wonder what hours he worked there? Do they have perhaps a clocking in machine? How do they check that when he is sat there with a pencil in his hand, scratching himself, that it is a verse on his mind and not a shopping list? I have a collection of Roy's poems copied out by hand in my commonplace book. These two are particular favourites. DUTCH SCHOOL The hidden symbolism of the real! It seems that Dutchmen painted them long ago Ostensibly commonplace interiors But in the shadows hands touched guilty things And even some lighted gesture sent unease, Adjacent to

This poem illustrates perfectly John Fenton's view that "a good poem takes some irresolvable complication, worries it to death like a dog with a bone, and leaves it still unresolved. The pleasure of the poem lies entirely in the worrying, the verbal growling and play. Life itself stubbornly remains entirely like a bone.”  ALL THE MEMBERS OF MY TRIBE ARE LIARS Think of a self-effacing missionary  Tending the vices of a problem tribe.  He knows the quickest cure for beri-beri  And how to take a bribe.  And so the mind will never say it’s beaten  By primitive disturbance of the liver;  Its logic will prevent its being eaten,  Get it across the river.  But faced with this assured inconsequence  That damns the very method that is used,  It leaves the heart unproselytised and hence  Admits that it’s confused.  I know I’m acting, but I still must act.  I melt to foolishness, and want it ended.  Why it continues is this simple fact:  I’d hate to end it.  For n