December 2002 - Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

I came across this poem a few years ago in a borrowed book called something like - "A poem for the day". I jotted down a few of my favourites from it, including this one. Those of us who have lived in houses heated only by open fires know very well the hostility of the cold which awaits on winter mornings. Robert Hayden describes this cold as a "chronic anger" and "blueblack" perfectly conveying the forbidding iciness which confronts the person whose task it is to rise and subdue it. This office fell to Hayden's father who, despite having also to brave the cold all week as a preliminary to setting out for his work, allowed himself no rest on Sundays, lighting the fires and polishing shoes. 

The sadness which pervades this poem comes from the sense of knowledge gained too late. Hayden did not appreciate his father's love which perhaps he was only able to show through such practical tasks - through making the house warm, through making shoes shine. The repeating of "What did I know?" in the penultimate line carries with it all the force of the poet's belated understanding and regret.

SUNDAYS too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labour 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?

November 2002 - To My Brothers by John Keats

John Keats wrote this sonnet on November 18th, 1816 on the night of his brother Tom's birthday. At this time Keats had not yet given up his medical career and was sharing lodgings in Cheapside, London with Tom and his elder brother George. Owing to his keenly felt lack of parental closeness John's love for his brothers in his own words - "surpassed the love of women." Towards Tom Keats in particular perhaps, this love was the stronger due to a shared sensitivity which the bluffer, more prosaic George lacked. 

In reading 'To My Brothers' we are transported to the cold dark November night where the three young men are sitting by a fire in companionable silence. Tom and George stare transfixed at the growing flames whilst John scribbles down his poem. In these apparently simple lines, we are afforded a glimpse into what was possibly the most important element in Keats' life.

SMALL, busy flames play through the fresh laid coals,
And their faint cracklings o’er our silence creep
Like whispers of the household gods that keep
A gentle empire o’er fraternal souls.
And while, for rhymes, I search around the poles,
Your eyes are fix’d, as in poetic sleep,
Upon the lore so voluble and deep,
That aye at fall of night our care condoles.
This is your birth-day Tom, and I rejoice
That thus it passes smoothly, quietly.
Many such eves of gently whisp’ring noise
May we together pass, and calmly try
What are this world’s true joys, - ere the great voice,
From its fair face, shall bid our spirits fly.

October 2002 - Poem In October by Dylan Thomas

If poems were kept in galleries, then those of Dylan Thomas would have pride of place in Tate Modern. To sit in the hush and subdued light of Tate Modern's Mark Rothko room is, perhaps, to experience something akin to reading Thomas' words. Beauty, sadness, hope and a sense of deep (and perhaps fatal) understanding of life seems to resonate from the works of both artists.

'Poem in October' is one of Thomas' most accessible poems and probably not without intention, for its theme is the resurgence of childhood memory, that most common and simple experience that we all share. The poet is walking out around his home town on his birthday, a breezy, drizzly October day, maybe feeling the weight of his thirty years, until a sudden change of that flighty autumn weather brings out both the sun and an overwhelming sense of his childhood self and its innocent joy.

Whenever Thomas writes on such subjects, he is at his most open to us and that is surely how it should be.

    IT was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
    And the mussel pooled and the heron
            Priested shore
        The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
        Myself to set foot
            That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

    My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
    Above the farms and the white horses
            And I rose
        In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
        Over the border
            And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

    A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
    Blackbirds and the sun of October
            Summery
        On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
        To the rain wringing
            Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

    Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
    With its horns through mist and the castle
            Brown as owls
        But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
        There could I marvel
            My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

    It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
    Streamed again a wonder of summer
            With apples
        Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
        Through the parables
            Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

    And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
    These were the woods the river and sea
            Where a boy
        In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
        And the mystery
            Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

    And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
    Joy of the long dead child sang burning
            In the sun.
        It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
        O may my heart's truth
            Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.

September 2002

As it's the inauguration of this page, we've decided on no less than TWO seasonal offers from established favourites.

Ode to Autumn by John Keats

Keats wrote this poem, which so perfectly encompasses the softly replete mood of the season, on Sunday 19th September 1819 during a stay in Winchester. The past year had not been an easy one for him, including the death of his much-loved brother, intimations of his own impending illness and problems in love, and yet for a brief time that Autumn, he found himself in a mood of quiet calm in which he could forget his troubles and simply lose himself in the gentle and unregretful way that nature prepares herself for Winter.

SEASON of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease;
For Summer has o'erbrimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,
While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river-sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Digging by Edward Thomas

This poem, so simple yet lacking nothing, is special to me because, as a gardener, I understand so well the spirit in which it was written. It is a poem about fragrance, the purest and best of fragrances which Nature yields readily if only one spends a little time getting to know her. I am pleased that Thomas notes his crumbling and smelling the soil as that is something I have loved to do as long as I can remember.

To-day I think
Only with scents, - scents dead leaves yield,
And bracken, and wild carrot's seed,
And the square mustard field;

Odours that rise
When the spade wounds the root of tree,
Rose, currant, raspberry, or goutweed,
Rhubarb or celery;

The smoke's smell, too,
Flowing from where a bonfire burns
The dead, the waste, the dangerous,
And all to sweetness turns.

It is enough
To smell, to crumble the dark earth,
While the robin sings over again
Sad songs of Autumn mirth.