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...