David Morley's The Gypsy and the Poet: "Worlds Move Underfoot..."

 

The Gypsy and the Poet by David Morley. Carcanet Press (2013)

 

 

David Morley's most recent collection, The Gypsy and the Poet, reflects his background in ecology and his Romany heritage, but it is also a unique tribute to one of the most celebrated poets of the English countryside, John Clare. Many of the poems make up an ongoing dialogue between Clare and a mysterious Gypsy named Wisdom Smith.

 

Wisdom Smith appears briefly in John Clare's notebooks, and Morley uses this as a starting point for a series of playful, joyous sonnets made up of springy, alliterative verse which occasionally turns sombre (as when Clare says "Were poems children/I should stamp their lives out" and Wisdom Smith responds "Then do not make them", in 'My Children'.) I found myself wondering if Wisdom Smith was simply another aspect of Clare's complex personality (or is Clare another aspect of Wisdom Smith?) and if the sequence was a sort of Yeatsian dialogue of self and soul. This is particularly the case towards the end of the collection, as Clare descends into madness and the corporeal reality of the two figures' encounters becomes more doubtful. I think the poems can be read either as real encounters or as aspects of one personality, but in any case, the two characters have much to teach each other. Each sees the world at an angle that the other finds challenging, and so they bring each other to new understandings, even if it's through banter and mockery:

 

 

'I do not read, brother,' states Wisdom smiling,

'for I will not bother with Mystery.

Worlds move underfoot. Where lives Poetry?'

 

(from 'Worlds')

 

 

Wisdom Smith gets Clare to live in the moment, in the natural world; Clare gets him to look more seriously at poetry.

 

 

'Poetry is in season,' laughs John. 'Rooms woven from wound wood

are like rooms of woven words.' Wisdom looks at Clare - hard.

'Poetry is not everything. You know that, John,' smiles the Gypsy.

'You are wrong,' dances Clare. 'Everything. Everything is poetry.'

 

(from 'Bender')

 

 

The poems are highlighted by English and Romany epigraphs, which heighten the impression of a dialogue between two cultures, both at home in the natural world, but in different ways.

 

The book is divided into three sections, the first and third of which are the John Clare and Wisdom Smith sonnets. The central section is made up of a variety of nature poems, including pieces which became part of the Slow Art Trail in Strid Wood, poems based on birdsong and painted on bird boxes, and shape poems. I am not really a fan of shape poems in general, but I saw all the poems in this section as a kind of extension of John Clare's (and David Morley's) notebooks and his observations about his life in the natural world. These poems are a record of what is happening around us, often unperceived, and they go a long way to show us how complex and intertwined the natural world is. Two poems, 'Fight' and 'Ballad of the Moon, Moon' are based on Lorca and his rich, strange perceptions of the Gypsy world.

 

The Gypsy and the Poet is a book to be taken out and read in the fields or the forest, but if this isn't possible, it can at least take the reader there in imagination and provide new insights into our relationship with the natural world and with other cultures, all wrapped up in some very colourful, distinctive and haunting verse.

 

 

 

BARDEN TOWER (David Morley)

 

 

I have heard a tourist claim this view

as though she had bought it at cost -

an expensive mirror. Unseen and ornately

ivy throws its ropes across the leaf-litter

shifting a forest's massive furniture;

 

the moss robes veil the thrones

of fallen oaks; trees flare with lichen;

Autumn smashes rainbows across

the woodland floor. You may never

have seen these trees more brilliantly

 

than when you turned your eyes

to that hunting lodge and sensed the light

kindle a million leaf mirrors.

In his woods near Lake Tuusula

Jean Sibelius shaped symphonies

 

from the speech of trees; firs bowed

violins while his swans sailed, keening.

Before his death a solitary swan

veered over and made him her own.

I am close to you who once shared this view.

 

This is not my sky, my flight, my words. This is not a mirror.

 

 

                                                     Walking from Embsay back to Barden Bridge

 

 

 

 

Poem © David Morley, 2013. Artwork © Peter Blegvad. Used by permission.

 



Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach'...On Dover Beach

Dover Beach, photo © Clarissa Aykroyd, 2013



About a month ago I went to Dover with a friend who was visiting London and wanted to see the White Cliffs. I warned her that Dover might not be everything she had always hoped for, but we went, and we had fun, despite getting rained on quite a bit.

This picture was, of course, taken on Dover Beach. Dover is quite industrial, and the cliffs were a bit distant. But you stand there, and you think of all that Dover has seen, in history. And then you think of Matthew Arnold - and that's never a bad thing.


DOVER BEACH (Matthew Arnold)

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

"It's Him" - Poetry For Richard III

Violent death on the battlefield is still a part of life in 2013, and sadly, when it hits the headlines it tends to be either young soldiers or civilians. This week a man who died on the battlefield is in the headlines once again. This time, though, the death took place hundreds of years ago, and the man was a king.

In September 2012, historians, archaeologists and enthusiasts working on a dig in Leicester announced that they had found a skeleton, in the ruins of Greyfriars church, which might be that of Richard III. The skeleton showed signs of scoliosis and of battle injuries which matched contemporary descriptions of Richard and his fate. On Monday of this week, at a press conference, it was announced that the remains were thought "beyond reasonable doubt" to be Richard's. The identification was partly based on a DNA comparison with a Canadian who is a descendant of Richard's sister.

It is startling to have a story like this in the news, and to see the excitement it has generated. Some say that this could shed major light on our perceptions of Richard III; others say it will make no difference at all. Personally, my investment in Richard, his life and his fate have everything to do with Josephine Tey's great novel The Daughter of Time, in which a detective redeems him from the charge of having murdered the Princes in the Tower. The novel's historical validity is not accepted by everyone, but it certainly convinced me at a fairly young age. The fact that I very much want Richard to not have been the murderer of the Princes is probably a good indication that I should never be a historian; I'm not exactly free from emotional bias. Still, as fascinating as this discovery is, it's unlikely to definitively solve that old mystery. (However, nothing will ever induce me to like Thomas More, who did a later hatchet job on Richard's reputation, and who was also an enemy of William Tyndale.)

I have written a poem for Richard III and for the reactions the discovery has inspired, and here it is.


"IT'S HIM"

-On the identification of Richard III's remains in Leicester, February 2013


That morning, words fell in flurries.
"It's him." A friend's text message,
headlines of here and now: "It's him."
Murmurs, flickers in the crowd. Cheers,
as though they glimpsed one still alive.
The king is dead, long dead, but lives.

Five hundred years and more.
Footfalls, hoofbeats, hum of cars
masked the quiet tick of bones in earth.
Now, noise and light, and the king's face,
but the king is dead. Only the eyeless skull,
the smooth curve of the spine's river.

Who would not try to speak
for the voiceless dead? We strain
to hear words on the thin pained lips,
to see light in the painted eyes.
We try to hold the fragments. But time forbids,
expectant mother, secret-keeper still.


Poem © Clarissa Aykroyd, 2013.

Thomas, Frost, Farjeon: The Dark Earth and the Light Sky

"He looks on English things impatiently, but also as a lover might look upon his beloved for the last time. He seems always conscious that a world is coming to an end, though he never says so, it is his tone and it is the tone of his poems; which has taken us fifty years to hear." (P J Kavanagh)

"He is the father of us all." (Ted Hughes)


Last night I went to see The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, a play at Islington's Almeida Theatre about World War I poet Edward Thomas (Pip Carter), his great friends and poets Robert Frost (Shaun Dooley) and Eleanor Farjeon (Pandora Colin), and his wife Helen Thomas (Hattie Morahan). It was written by Nick Dear and directed by Richard Eyre. The play is just ending its world premiere run in London, and it has been extremely well reviewed. I found it to be one of the most powerful and moving plays I have seen in the last few years.

I think the first poem I read by Thomas was probably 'Rain', and probably some years ago. While beautifully written, it remains one of the most suicidally depressing poems I have ever read, and it didn't exactly encourage me to read on in his body of work. However, his name is one which recurs the more you delve into English and British poetry. Witness the quotation from Ted Hughes, above. Many great poets, including the likes of Dylan Thomas, Auden, and Heaney, cite him as an enormous influence, or even a catalyst for their own writing. At the same time, he is not exactly a household name, although I think he is now being studied for GCSEs or A-levels (unfortunately, this may not endear him to a future generation of young readers.)

I booked my ticket for The Dark Earth and the Light Sky several weeks ago, when I realised that it was a) about poetry and poets, and b) was likely to sell out because of how well it has been received and because the Almeida is a small theatre. I gradually, started reading a few more of his poems, and discovered that my initial impressions of him were very limited and rather inaccurate. I had seen him as a poet very much of his time, and mainly pastoral. (I also knew that while he was considered a "war poet", and he died in the war, his poems weren't mostly about the war.)

What I found when I actually bothered to read the poems properly was that Thomas was indeed heavily influenced by the pastoral, and in many ways his language was of its time. However, the shifting perspectives and emotions, the dreamlike blurring of times and places - these are all very modern, very powerful, and sometimes rather shocking. You may start reading one of his poems thinking that it's a nice but slightly depressing piece about the countryside; only to end up gasping for breath, sucker punched by a daring but accurate emotional shift, or a perceptive leap which you would never have thought of but which rings entirely true.

The words "extreme vision" came into my mind when I read some of his poems. He pushes the possibilities of what I would call the "alternative seeing" that poets possess, to their uttermost limits. English poet and critic John Lehmann called it an "intensity of vision" which outstripped that of most of his contemporaries. He chose to write with a vocabulary and apparatus of maps and places. Robert Macfarlane wrote: "To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self. These traverses - between the conceptual, the spectral and the personal - occur often without signage in his writing, and are among its most characteristic events."

The Dark Earth and the Light Sky also employed shifting perspectives. We don't hear much of Thomas's own interior dialogue, except when he addresses the mysterious "other man" who seems to have governed some of his most important decisions. We see Thomas through the eyes of his passionate wife Helen, who loved him unconditionally and was nearly destroyed by the coldness and animosity which were part of his ongoing depression. These scenes were often painful to watch, as was the confrontation between Helen Thomas and Robert Frost, who felt that Helen had betrayed her husband's memory in her frank memoirs. Frost mainly saw Thomas as a remarkable poetic talent, but also reflected on his depression and said: "He didn't want to die, but he didn't want to not die." The shape of their friendship was carefully depicted in only a relatively small number of scenes. I was astonished by how much of the play involved discussion of the craft of poetry. Thomas, consumed by self-loathing, was convinced he couldn't write; Frost encouraged him by pointing to his remarkable nascent talent, and describing poetry as essential, more important than the patriotism engendered by the war, "a momentary stay against confusion." Meanwhile, Eleanor Farjeon nursed an unrequited (?) crush on Thomas and delighted the audience with her vivacity. The interactions between these individuals and Thomas, and their direct addresses to the audience about the man they knew, build up a more complete, rounded picture of a poet who still remains elusive in many ways.

Thomas constantly looked back to pre-industrial times, and found himself trapped between a desire for the pastoral ("I remember when there was lavender on Lavender Hill," he says to his uncomprehending father) and a drive to become engaged with the real world, to prove himself worthy of England, to become "a conscious Englishman." This was what led him to enlist, at least in part. The scene where Helen and Eleanor go through Thomas's effects after his death at Arras in 1917 had me and, I think, much of the audience in tears.

The staging was very bare, but effective. One of the reviews I read suggested that in many respects this was a play that shouldn't have worked particularly well, certainly in structural terms, but worked extraordinarily well.

At the end of the play, Thomas steps forward and speaks this poem.



LIGHTS OUT (Edward Thomas)


I have come to the borders of sleep,
The unfathomable deep
Forest where all must lose
Their way, however straight,
Or winding, soon or late;
They cannot choose.

Many a road and track
That, since the dawn's first crack,
Up to the forest brink,
Deceived the travellers,
Suddenly now blurs,
And in they sink.

Here love ends,
Despair, ambition ends;
All pleasure and all trouble,
Although most sweet or bitter,
Here ends in sleep that is sweeter
Than tasks most noble.

There is not any book
Or face of dearest look
That I would not turn from now
To go into the unknown
I must enter, and leave, alone,
I know not how.

The tall forest towers;
Its cloudy foliage lowers
Ahead, shelf above shelf;
Its silence I hear and obey
That I may lose my way
And myself.

England's West Country: Coleridge, Shelley, Mayne...and Baskerville Hounds

At the end of December a friend and I spent a few days in the West Country - mainly Devon, with a quick foray into Cornwall and Somerset. Reports that Devon was an entirely underwater county proved to be more or less unfounded, and although there was definitely quite a lot of rain, there were also many sunny intervals. Most importantly, Dartmoor featured some satisfyingly foggy moments.

Dartmoor has probably been on my must-visit list ever since I read Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (a long time ago) and the only slightly less-known story 'Silver Blaze', both of which feature a fairly well-known detective named Sherlock Holmes. I would be at least mildly interested in visiting almost every place I have ever come across in a book; even if they are not terribly exciting places in themselves, the literary associations will add and add and add to them. If the place is beautiful and wonderful in itself, though, few things could be more wonderful.

Approaching Dartmoor by train with Sir Henry, Dr Watson describes what he sees in vivid terms: "Over the green squares of the fields and the low curve of a wood there rose in the distance a gray, melancholy hill, with a strange jagged summit, dim and vague in the distance, like some fantastic landscape in a dream." Later, as they approach Baskerville Hall by carriage:


We had left the fertile country behind and beneath us. We looked back on it now, the slanting rays of a low sun turning the streams to threads of gold and glowing on the red earth new turned by the plough and the broad tangle of the woodlands. The road in front of us grew bleaker and wilder over huge russet and olive slopes, sprinkled with giant boulders. Now and then we passed a moorland cottage, walled and roofed with stone, with no creeper to break its harsh outline. Suddenly we looked down into a cuplike depression, patched with stunted oaks and firs which had been twisted and bent by the fury of years of storm. Two high, narrow towers rose over the trees. (from The Hound of the Baskervilles)


My friend, less enthused by Holmesiana than I am and a little tired of driving, still drove me obligingly all over the moor, and the above descriptions were exactly what I found. At one point we plunged into a cloud; later, in a moment of madness, I braved the wind and rain and ran up the eerie and beautiful Haytor. Here is a picture:

I was struck by how utterly vast Dartmoor seemed. Its skies were wider than I imagined; maybe it's partly that TV screens make it small, but I felt that I had to go there to really understand. Although we did not drive all around its edge, I had a very strange feeling that the moor was larger inside its boundaries than ordinary physical dimensions would permit, and that I had passed into a place which was utterly detached from the soft and lovely countryside around it.

On a more poetic note, the West Country held more poetry associations than I had imagined. In Lynmouth, we found Shelley's Hotel, although this may or may not have been the exact building where Percy Bysshe Shelley and his young bride stayed during their honeymoon. I was even more fascinated by the Coleridge associations. We had lunch in Porlock, a beautiful town on the north coast which yielded a sinister Person from Porlock, who disturbed the drugged-up and dream-haunted Samuel Taylor Coleridge and prevented him from giving us the fullest possible account of 'Kubla Khan'. Near the Quantock Hills, we stopped briefly at the Coleridge Cottage, where he wrote 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', among others. Here is a picture:

We based ourselves in a flat kindly lent by a colleague, in a very small town called Hatherleigh. I discovered that this was the birthplace (or at least place of baptism) of Jasper Mayne, a clergyman, translator and poet who lived in the seventeenth century. This rather fascinating poem, 'Time', is his:


TIME (Jasper Mayne)

TIME is the feather'd thing,
And, whilst I praise
The sparklings of thy looks and call them rays,
Takes wing,
Leaving behind him as he flies
An unperceivèd dimness in thine eyes.
His minutes, whilst they're told,
Do make us old;
And every sand of his fleet glass,
Increasing age as it doth pass,
Insensibly sows wrinkles there
Where flowers and roses do appear.
Whilst we do speak, our fire
Doth into ice expire,
Flames turn to frost;
And ere we can
Know how our crow turns swan,
Or how a silver snow
Springs there where jet did grow,
Our fading spring is in dull winter lost.
Since then the Night hath hurl'd
Darkness, Love's shade,
Over its enemy the Day, and made
The world
Just such a blind and shapeless thing
As 'twas before light did from darkness spring,
Let us employ its treasure
And make shade pleasure:
Let 's number out the hours by blisses,
And count the minutes by our kisses;
Let the heavens new motions feel
And by our embraces wheel;
And whilst we try the way
By which Love doth convey
Soul unto soul,
And mingling so
Makes them such raptures know
As makes them entrancèd lie
In mutual ecstasy,
Let the harmonious spheres in music roll!

Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop' and Writing Britain at the British Library

A few weeks ago, I finally went to the Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands exhibition at the British Library. It was in its final two weeks, so my friends and I got in just under the wire. I knew that I couldn't miss it, as I'd had this exhibition earmarked as one of my cultural highlights of the year for quite some time. Concentrating on the importance of place and landscape in British literature, Writing Britain featured so many of my absolute favourite books and writers that I wondered if I had been personally consulted on the exhibition and then fed memory-loss pills so that I would forget all about it. (I am not sure in what scenario exactly this would take place.) From Susan Cooper to Kenneth Grahame, from a Heart of Darkness graphic novel to a letter to John Betjeman complaining that the order of the stations in his poem 'The Metropolitan Railway' was wrong - this was very, very much my cup of tea.

Broadly, the places and movements featured in the exhibition included the following: rural Britain; the gradual vanishing of rural Britain due to the Industrial Revolution; industrial landscapes such as the coal mines of Wales and the Midlands; wild places such as the moors, and their interactions with humans; sacred places; London; the suburbs; rivers; and the sea. London is, as always, primarily a place of darkness, but a remarkably varied one, from Gautam Malkani's Londonstani to the original title for Eliot's The Waste Land, "He do the police in different voices", to Conrad's pre-Le Carré and Orwell vision of The Secret Agent and a city haunted by terrorism. The suburbs are both homely and threatening: the Metropolitan Railway invited middle-class commuters to embrace "Metroland", but in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, the suburbs are often settings for dreadful crimes (one of the manuscripts featured was 'The Retired Colourman', where Holmes investigates sinister doings in Lewisham.)

Many poets appeared in Writing Britain. Ted Hughes's collaboration with Fay Godwin, Elmet, was there; 'Belfast Confetti' by the wonderful Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson; a video about Simon Armitage's Stanza Stones project, which carves poems into the natural landscape of Yorkshire; Wendy Cope, Sean O'Brien, and many, many others. Also featured was the much-loved poem by Edward Thomas, 'Adlestrop', in manuscript and in a recording read by his wife. Here is the poem:



ADLESTROP (Edward Thomas)

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,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


'Adlestrop' gives me a strange feeling of looking in on - almost interrupting - something I find moving but don't entirely understand. I can't help wondering if you have to be English to entirely grasp its emotional import. It was written around the start of World War I - which killed Thomas, like so many others - and there is a sense that he is seizing a quiet, simple moment in the English countryside and storing it away, later to imbue it with even deeper meaning. It has also been pointed out that all the young men of some villages were wiped out in the war, and Thomas may have wondered what the fate of this place and its people would be.

I do think that British landscapes, whether urban or rural, are a palimpsest; their own self-contained beauty or terror, with the human traces which have defaced or celebrated them continually overlaid. I've said before that I tend to see places through a lens of literature and art, and this is particularly the case with Britain. Some of the landscapes are spectacular in themselves, but they tend to be understated, and not technicolour, like some other parts of the world. When you know about the great works of art or the acts of human endeavour that they have produced, the terrible or beautiful events and the echoes that they have left, these places have a hundred times more meaning.

The painting is The Hay-Wain by John Constable, one of the greatest of English painters, though I've always found it much easier to love JMW Turner.

Green and Pleasant Games: Blake's 'Jerusalem' and the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics

JERUSALEM (William Blake)

And did those feet in ancient time

Walk upon Englands mountains green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
 

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?
 

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

Bring me my arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!
 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:

Till we have built Jerusalem,

In Englands green & pleasant Land.

The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games ran from late July until early September. It is hard to believe that it is all over, and equally hard to believe that everything went so well; I don't want to say "flawlessly", but some have definitely said so. The forecasted transport apocalypse didn't happen (in fact, it tended to be weirdly quiet away from the venues) and most everyone had a jolly good time. In fact, we all beheld the extraordinary spectacle of the British gushing uncontrollably about the awesomeness of their green and pleasant land, their people, and especially their athletes. I was less surprised when this happened during the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, because Canadians can be pretty gushy about Canada anyway, but the default for the Brits is usually self-deprecation at best about Britain.

At the start of the Olympic Opening Ceremonies, a boy soprano sang Blake's 'Jerusalem', in its famous musical setting by Sir Hubert Parry. This was utterly predictable and still very moving. 'Jerusalem' is taken from the much longer Milton a Poem, and describes a story wherein the young Jesus Christ visited England. There is no historical basis for this story, but it is a beautiful poem and piece of music. It is time for me to admit that I first came to it through Emerson, Lake & Palmer's version, during my prolonged progressive rock period in my teens. I still hear Palmer's mad drumming in the background.

'Jerusalem' is a piece very beloved of the British, or at least the English. I have been present when it's played or sung and it offers a rare glimpse of naked emotion in the English, as well as being rather mystical and somewhat bonkers. These were qualities that also came to the fore during the Games - Britain performed extremely well in both the Olympics and the Paralympics. Although poetry's voice was heard in various ways during these Games - modern poems scattered around the Olympic Park, glimpses of verse during the Ceremonies - this old poem by the great and strange Blake still represents the spirit of the Games, to me.

I spent both the Olympics and the Paralympics either quite involved, or rather detached. It seemed as though I was either in the thick of things, or catching glimpses from a distance. The Torch went right past my window in south London on a day when I was at home, and that was quite exciting. Also predictably, these were mainly Horse Games, for me. I managed to snag tickets for both Olympic and Paralympic dressage, both of which were cheap and utterly irresistible. The Olympic dressage was at Grand Prix level and was extraordinarily beautiful and skilled - these horses are the Cadillacs of the equine world. Here is Britain's Carl Hester on Uthopia, part of the gold-medal-winning team:

The Paralympic dressage featured riders with a variety of disabilities, generally involving inability to use their legs or one side of their body, due to spinal injuries, cerebral palsy and so on - one rider was actually born without legs. Here, the wonder was at watching an extraordinary sympathy between horse and rider under difficult circumstances, although the movements were less complex than in the Olympic competition. I found both events very moving, in somewhat different ways. Here is Britain's Natasha Baker on Cabral, the gold medallist:

I also went out with a friend to Box Hill in Surrey to see the women's cycling road race, which involved walking 45 minutes up a fairly steep hill, getting rained on, dodging a thunderstorm and then broiled by the sun, cheering our heads off for every competitor, and generally having a very fun day out.

As far as detachment, I don't have TV at home, so I missed a lot of the coverage. Still, I enjoyed some events on big screens set up in public places, including near my work, and there was a generally festive atmosphere. I'm not that devoted to most summer sports anyway (a lot of Canadians prefer the Winter Games and I fall into that category). It was also particularly nice to see how cheerful, helpful and obliging virtually all the staff, volunteers, police, military, etc involved in the Games were. I really feel that post-Games London could benefit from trying to keep at least a bit of that spirit going.

In a sense I was relieved when it was all over, as I tend to worry about issues surrounding security; perhaps overhyped like all the other negative aspects. On the other hand, now the autumn and winter are stretching ahead and looking darker every day. I think I need to ensure that the coming months are filled with things that are important, fun, or both.

"Horsemen for Companions": Me At Royal Ascot, Yeats At Galway Races

Royal Ascot 2012, © Chris Turner

I spent yesterday at Royal Ascot, thanks to a friend's generosity. Lunch, Pimms, fascinators and funny hats, the Queen, people-watching, good company, and horses horses horses...pretty much a perfect day. I loved seeing a microcosm of the English personality in this event.

I think this was the third time I'd been to the races, and it eclipsed my visits to the small racetrack outside my hometown in Canada - the last of which was more than twenty years ago, when I was a horse-obsessed child. I have very mixed feelings about racing, but I couldn't help being caught up in the beauty of the horses. If you want someone gorgeous and neurotic in your life, you could do worse than to go for a Thoroughbred. I'm a non-gambler and some say that takes the fun out of watching racing, but I didn't even care who won. I don't have a gaming mentality in the least, anyway. I felt swept away every time the horses went past me, whether cantering down to the gate, or streaming at high speed to the post. I was too busy capturing and filing away moments - the checkerboards and little stars brushed into gleaming hindquarters, the dilated nostrils and shining eyes, the beautiful angular flow and colours as they ran down the track, like a Raoul Dufy painting - to really care about the outcome. And at least turf racing isn't quite as rough as dirt racing.

I also couldn't help thinking that I was probably enjoying myself a lot more than some of the posh people who come every year. I don't quite know how, but even after years of living in London I've managed to maintain a totally unjaded attitude towards special experiences; perhaps because I do view them very strongly as being special. I'd rather have my starry-eyed moments of wonder than become someone who always compares an experience unfavourably to the last one that vaguely resembled it. It's one thing that I've found very valuable in my life.

I'm not that familiar with poems of the horse racing world, and I invite anyone to make suggestions if you wish. I thought of this poem by W B Yeats, 'At Galway Races'. The Galway Races are still a famous racing meet in Ireland, and one that I thought I might go to when I lived there but never did. A different atmosphere from Ascot, I imagine. This is a mid-period Yeats poem, and I imagine that as well as evoking the sweep and rush of a racecourse, he was also thinking more broadly of the "indomitable Irishry" who he referred to in 'Under Ben Bulben', and their potential for the nascent future of Ireland. I wonder if he ever went to Ascot or what he would have made of it. Yeats was Anglo-Irish - my own ancestry is partly Anglo-Irish, and when I researched and wrote about Jonathan Swift a few years ago, I realised that I related strongly to these men's conflicted view of Ireland, from my few years living there.

Anyway, the poem, which would find a place somewhere among my many Yeats favourites:


AT GALWAY RACES (W B Yeats)

There where the course is,
Delight makes all of the one mind,
The riders upon the galloping horses,
The crowd that closes in behind:
We, too, had good attendance once,

Hearers and hearteners of the work;

Aye, horsemen for companions,

Before the merchant and the clerk

Breathed on the world with timid breath.

Sing on: somewhere at some new moon,

We'll learn that sleeping is not death,

Hearing the whole earth change its tune,

Its flesh being wild, and it again

Crying aloud as the racecourse is,

And we find hearteners among men

That ride upon horses.

"Where I Will Heal Me Of My Grievous Wound": Arthuriana In My Life

from THE PASSING OF ARTHUR (Alfred, Lord Tennyson)


 And slowly answered Arthur from the barge:
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within himself make pure! but thou,
If thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
But now farewell. I am going a long way
With these thou seëst--if indeed I go
(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)--
To the island-valley of Avilion;
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow,
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies
Deep-meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea,
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound."


Everything in my life has always seemed to lead on to something else. I suppose that's probably so normal as to seem trite (or not), but to me even random events tend to seem teleological, or at least part of a pattern.

I was always fascinated by medievalism as a child. My brother and I preferred the Legos which built knights and castles to the "town" and "space" versions (those were simpler times); we played at knights and read Tolkien, Ivanhoe and Knight Crusader. My brother did his MA thesis on Robin Hood. I've since moved on to Gladiator, but it's much the same thing. Somewhere in there, King Arthur was bound to emerge as a major obsession, which happened in my late teens.

17-22 was quite a critical age for me, and I developed such a passion for Arthuriana that I seriously considered doing an English MA with an Arthurian focus. I didn't, but it would have been an interesting path. I did a mini-thesis for my BA on Merlin, and had a short story on Bedivere and the Questing Beast published. Also, judging by my bookshelves in my parents' house, I seem to have collected pretty much every modern Arthurian retelling going - those that aren't on the shelves I borrowed from the library. While I also collected and read a lot of the original medieval tales, I tended to find them harder going. Unfortunately, quite a lot of the modern works were a bit too much in the bodice-ripping romance vein or were influenced by neo-paganism, neither of which are remotely my cup of tea. It was actually quite hard to find really good, well-written Arthurian novels. Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, The Last Enchantment) was very significant for me, and I also loved Rosemary Sutcliff's books - her more traditional retellings (The Sword and the Circle, The Light Beyond the Forest, The Road to Camlann) when I was younger, and her adult novel Sword at Sunset when I was older. Gillian Bradshaw's novels were great too. As much as I like the idea of retelling old stories, though, a lot of the novels were rather forgettable.

I did like Tennyson very much, but I read relatively little Arthurian poetry that made a really big impression. Edwin Muir's poem 'Merlin', quoted at the start of one of Mary Stewart's novels, was beautiful and moving:


O Merlin in your crystal cave
Deep in the diamond of the day
Will there ever be a singer
Whose music will smooth away
The furrow drawn by Adam's finger
Across the memory and the wave?


I also read Edwin Arlington Robinson's excellent long poems, and some of Charles Williams's strange Taliessin Through Logres and The Region of Summer Stars, and other short poems here and there. But there might just be a world of Arthurian poetry out there for me to discover, still.

I have often told people that Sherlock Holmes was a major reason why I ended up moving to London, or that he at least helped me to develop an obsession with all things English. To a certain extent, I could say the same about Arthuriana, though it was a later passion in my life than Holmes. In 2002 I went to the International Arthurian Society conference in Bangor, Wales, and although I really did want to go, it was partly a pretext to get my European (er, British Isles) adventure started. It had also led me broadly to an interest in English and Welsh mythology.

By the time I moved to London seven years ago, Arthuriana had really receded in my life. Sherlock Holmes seems to have stuck around more intensively, especially of late, with the new BBC series to enthrall me. Holmes is more alive to me in London. I've only really walked in the steps of Arthur in Wales, and that as though in a dream. There are so many Arthurs and Merlins and so many places where they could have lived or not lived. Still, Arthur never went away. I went up to Liverpool a few years ago specifically to see Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin in Port Sunlight, and I was not disappointed. I've chosen it as the logo of sorts for this blog. Then, in 2009 or 2010 (not sure which) I had a wonderful experience with the painting above, Burne-Jones's The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon.

The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon has been the Ponce Museum of Art in Puerto Rico for a long time, and I thought it was unlikely that I would ever see it. I'd like to visit Puerto Rico, but it is not high on my list. I was therefore totally astounded and delighted when I learned one day that the painting was in London, though only for a year. It was on loan from its home gallery while the gallery underwent renovation. At the time, I was working in Pimlico, and the painting was only around the corner at Tate Britain. Already feeling stunned about the whole thing, I went round to see it one day.

I remember walking through the familiar rooms of Tate Britain with a sense of purpose and slipping into the room where The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon was displayed. I sat down and just stared at it. I was overcome with the kind of shock and delight that sometimes takes me in artistic experiences - especially those which aren't just artistic experiences, but are tied up with so much else in my life. The painting is enormous (the picture above is only a detail from it) and extremely beautiful; classically Burne-Jones, with luminous colours and figures looking like angels. I got up and walked around to look more closely at the details - the flowers, the folds in the robes - and then sat down and stared again.

I went back to see it two or three more times before it went back to Puerto Rico, though I now wish I'd seen it even more. The experience still amazes me to think of, as I just never thought this was a painting I would lay eyes on and certainly not in London (for one thing, it seemed much to big to travel!). Seeing this painting confirmed to me, as well, that nothing and no-one ever leaves the pattern - old obsessions, artistic passions, people and places - even if they seem to be a part of my past.

Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows: Evoking a Pastoral England

from THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS (Kenneth Grahame)


Poor Ratty did his best, by degrees, to explain things; but how could he put into cold words what had mostly been suggestion? How recall, for another's benefit, the haunting sea voices that had sung to him, how reproduce at second-hand the magic of the Seafarer's hundred reminiscences? Even to himself, now the spell was broken and the glamour gone, he found it difficult to account for what had seemed, some hours ago, the inevitable and only thing. It is not surprising, then, that he failed to convey to the Mole any clear idea of what he had been through that day.
   
To the Mole this much was plain: the fit, or attack, had passed away, and had left him sane again, though shaken and cast down by the reaction. But he seemed to have lost all interest for the time in the things that went to make up his daily life, as well as in all pleasant forecastings of the altered days and doings that the changing season was surely bringing.
 
Casually, then, and with seeming indifference, the Mole turned his talk to the harvest that was being gathered in, the towering wagons and their straining teams, the growing ricks, and the large moon rising over bare acres dotted with sheaves. He talked of the reddening apples around, of the browning nuts, of jams and preserves and the distilling of cordials; till by easy stages such as these he reached midwinter, its hearty joys and its snug home life, and then he became simply lyrical.
   
By degrees the Rat began to sit up and to join in. His dull eye brightened, and he lost some of his listening air.
   
Presently the tactful Mole slipped away and returned with a pencil and a few half-sheets of paper, which he placed on the table at his friend's elbow.

`It's quite a long time since you did any poetry,' he remarked. `You might have a try at it this evening, instead of -- well, brooding over things so much. I've an idea that you'll feel a lot better when you've got something jotted down -- if it's only just the rhymes.'

   
The Rat pushed the paper away from him wearily, but the discreet Mole took occasion to leave the room, and when he peeped in again some time later, the Rat was absorbed and deaf to the world; alternately scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he sucked a good deal more than he scribbled; but it was joy to the Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.


Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows is, to me, one of the greatest works of English literature ever published - and not just among those written for children. Published in 1908, it evokes the classic elements of an England that now only exists in out-of-the-way places and brief glimpses; an England of rowboats, riverbank picnics, dark forests, wealthy eccentrics, and a faint mysticism of panpipes and mythological gods.

My parents bought me the edition of The Wind in the Willows pictured above, and I have very happy memories of my father reading it to me as a child. It was one of the books that made me dream of England, though I've found my way much closer to the England (or London, really) of Sherlock Holmes than the England of Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad.

In the above passage, Ratty has almost been seduced away from his riverside home by the hypnotic descriptions of a seafaring, world-wandering Sea Rat. I love how the Mole - a very practical sort - brings him back to reality by lovingly describing the details of the English countryside, and then by handing him some writing elements and encouraging him to get back to writing poetry. The bohemian Rat and the down-to-earth Mole have a bit of a Holmes-Watson partnership going on, which I think was picked up on even by some of the illustrators. I'm not aware that Holmes ever wrote poetry - it seems a bit out of character - but he did quote it from time to time.

It has been a long time since I have really read this book. I should return to it soon, and perhaps venture out into the countryside again, where I will remember that I live in a Wind in the Willows England as well as a Holmes England.

'Macavity, the Mystery Cat': Sherlock Holmes, T S Eliot and...Cats

MACAVITY, THE MYSTERY CAT (T S Eliot)

The above link will take you through to a very amusing video recording of former Children's Laureate Michael Rosen reciting 'Macavity'. From this page you can also access a text version. It is courtesy of the BBC, who included the poem as part of their 'Off By Heart' competition. If you have trouble accessing the BBC website, another link to the poem's text can be found here on the Guardian website.

T S Eliot, the author of 'Macavity' and so many other extraordinary poems, is a huge subject in himself and one that I'd like to return to another time. He is not an original choice for most revered poet, but I would probably have to give him the position in my literary life that I gave to W B Yeats ten or fifteen years ago. And not only was he the author of such groundbreaking, erudite and moving meditations on spiritual stagnation and growth, the nature of modern society and the passage of time as 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock', The Waste Land and Four Quartets - but he also wrote fun and hilarious poems about cats, collected as Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The collection was later adapted into the musical Cats. Achieving that level of diversity is definitely living the dream, in poetic terms.

The Practical Cats poems were plainly written by a poet who knew and understood cats, as well as having a host of funny literary and historical references at his fingertips. In 'The Naming of Cats', he writes:


I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?


He then goes on to suggest names such as Coricopat and Bombalurina - as well, of course, as the cat's everyday name, and the "Effanineffable/Deep and inscrutable singular Name" that only it knows. A few poems feature dogs, usually Pekes meeting some terrible fate. The poem called 'Of the Awefull Battle of the Pekes and the Pollicles Together With Some Account of the Participation of the Pugs and the Poms, and the Intervention of the Great Rumpuscat" makes me laugh out loud. My mother tells me that when she and my father lived in England in the early 1970s, they had a landlady who had several cats ranging from the adorable to the psychotic. When my parents moved out of that house, they gave the landlady a parting gift of the Practical Cats poems. She was later overheard in her sitting room reading them aloud and with great delight to a friend.

'Macavity, the Mystery Cat' is a special poem for me because it reflects Eliot's admiration for Sherlock Holmes. He was enough of a fan that his play Murder in the Cathedral adapted a passage from the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Musgrave Ritual' to the extent that it was nearly plagiarism. Macavity, "the Napoleon of Crime", is also Professor Moriarty, Holmes's arch-enemy. There are references to at least two or three specific Sherlock Holmes stories in the poem, and the image of a cat mastermind of evil "doing complicated long division sums" while his henchmen do his awful bidding is quite wonderful. Cats are very good at being masterminds of evil, except that they spend too much time napping. I have friends who have a cat that would look perfect in a tiny Darth Vader outfit (complete with tiny ears and an extension for the tail), but that's another story.

As for Sherlock Holmes, he and Dr Watson and the host of characters brought to life by Arthur Conan Doyle in an unforgettable London are important to me for so many reasons. Holmes entered my life when I was young, reading the stories ('The Speckled Band' scared me to pieces) and watching the incomparable Jeremy Brett on TV. When I was a teenager and even more obsessed, I dreamed of visiting London and seeing the places in the stories. I did that in my late teens, and swore I'd move to London some day. Well, here I am.

It really is no exaggeration to say that if you trace the idea back to its source, Holmes is probably at least 50% of the reason why I ended up in London. I still love him for the sarcastic, cold, passionate character that he is, and Watson for his loyalty and bravery, but even if I'd lost all interest in the stories for themselves, I would love them forever just because they brought me to this city.