Precursors

In between the endless onslaught of reading worthy and important (and usually badly written) official documents, there's so much more to be read.
This always feels like a July poem; especially after the weather change we've just had, of almost oppressive heat, building into the inevitable downpour.
This poem also reminds me too a bit of the dusty corridors of parliament, where there air is thick with ancient quotes, the over-bearing weight of history, infinite detail and a stifled perspective and anachronism rule - and it is sometimes easy to feel that 'none but insects dare to sing or pirouette.'    At times when the air seems unbearably thick with third-hand breath, it is easy to wish the rain would come to flush it all away- and I think many might suspect that politics can always do with more of those who have the gusto of wind or water-spout...

PRECURSORS 

O that the rain would come— the rain in big battalions— 
Or thunder flush the hedge a more clairvoyant green 
Or wind walk in and whip us and strip us or booming 
Harvest moon transmute this muted scene. 

But all is flat, matt, mute, unlivened, unexpectant, 
And none but insects dare to sing or pirouette; 
That Man is a dancer is an anachronism— 
Who has forgotten his steps or hardly learnt them yet. 

Yet one or two we have known who had the gusto 
Of wind or water-spout, and one or two 
Who carry an emerald lamp behind their faces 
And— during thunder-storms— the light comes shining through. 

LOUIS MACNEICE 

June Thunder and good language

I've just been inching through a particularly dull report. It's full of what I call 'council-speak' - the kind of stuff that is a language all of its own, and leaves you wondering what on earth it actually means - if it means much at all. And leaves you thinking that the same thing could have been said in about 3 pages, instead of 53. And then I thought of this poem, partly because of the month and the weather, but I thought I would post it up as an example of language used well: Saying an awful lot in really not that many words. The photo is one I took when I was out canvassing in Horfield.

June Thunder

Louis Macneice

The Junes were free and full, driving through tiny
Roads, the mudguards brushing the cowparsley,
Through fields of mustard and under boldly embattled
Mays and chestnuts

Or between beeches verdurous and voluptuous
Or where broom and gorse beflagged the chalkland--
All the flare and gusto of the unenduring
Joys of a season

Now returned but I note as more appropriate
To the maturer mood impending thunder
With an indigo sky and the garden hushed except for
The treetops moving.

Then the curtains in my room blow suddenly inward,
The shrubbery rustles, birds fly heavily homeward,
The white flowers fade to nothing on the trees and rain comes
Down like a dropscene.

Now there comes catharsis, the cleansing downpour
Breaking the blossoms of our overdated fancies
Our old sentimentality and whimsicality
Loves of the morning.

Blackness at half-past eight, the night's precursor,
Clouds like falling masonry and lightning's lavish
Annunciation, the sword of the mad archangel
Flashed from the scabbard.

If only you would come and dare the crystal
Rampart of the rain and the bottomless moat of thunder,
If only now you would come I should be happy
Now if now only.

Confession: I'm not Gordon Brown

Ok, ok, I admit it - I have taken a holiday. This summer I took a couple of weeks off to go down to Cornwall with my family. People can make you feel a bit guilty about taking a holiday, but I think it's vital. If you don't ever take your foot off the accelerator and take some time out to reassess things, I think you can end up going a bit nuts. Like Gordon Brown.

So, for the summer holidays, here's - not an uber-political blog post- but one of my favourite poems about the British sea side. It's by John Betjeman, who loved the coast of North Cornwall, as I do. But alas, I can't write poems about it like this: It's 'Winter Seascape', which , as anyone who has been down to Cornwall this summer will know, has been sadly appropriate for the summer holidays this year.

Winter Seascape
by John Betjeman

The sea runs back against itself
With scarcely time for breaking wave
To cannonade a slatey shelf
And thunder under in a cave.

Before the next can fully burst
The headwind, blowing harder still,
Smooths it to what it was at first

-A slowly rolling water-hill.

Against the breeze the breakers haste,
Against the tide their ridges run
And all the sea's a dappled waste
Criss-crossing underneath the sun.

Far down the beach the ripples drag
Blown backward, rearing from the shore,
And wailing gull and shrieking shag
Alone can pierce the ocean roar.

Unheard, a mongrel hound gives tongue,
Unheard are shouts of little boys;
What chance has any inland lung
Against this multi-water noise?

Here where the cliffs alone prevail
I stand exultant, neutral, free,
And from the cushion of the gale
Behold a huge consoling sea.

The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

We bought and decorated the Christmas tree last weekend. I always go for the non- 'non-drop' kind, because the way they smell- (all rich and of pine-forests when you come down in the morning) -more than makes up for the extra hoovering, in my books.
(Plus the decorations go easier on the branches...)

Everyone knows T.S. Eliot's poem about the Magi, but this is one that I love, and really captures the magic of Christmas that can so easily get lost in the panic about chores, turkeys and cards.


The Cultivation of Christmas Trees

There are several attitudes towards Christmas,
Some of which we may disregard:
The social, the torpid, the patently commercial,
The rowdy (the pubs being open till midnight),
And the childish -- which is not that of the child
For whom the candle is a star, and the gilded angel
Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree
Is not only a decoration, but an angel.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to the children
(And here I remember also with gratitude
St. Lucy, her carol, and her crown of fire):
So that before the end, the eightieth Christmas
(By 'eightieth' meaning whichever is the last)
The accumulated memories of annual emotion
May be concentrated into a great joy
Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion
When fear came upon every soul:
Because the beginning shall remind us of the end
And the first coming of the second coming.

T.S. Eliot

National Poetry Day

Today is National Poetry Day, so I couldn't resist having a small splurge. Below is one of my favourites. 'Nothing to be said' by Philip Larkin. With apologies for any morbidity.

I like this because in politics everyone always has so MUCH to say. All the time. And everybody charges around saying that they are more right than everyone else. But there are some things that really do leave nothing to be said, and this poem (and often poetry in general) gives a voice to this.

And perhaps the reason we all (politicians and non-politicians included) rush around so much, saying so much, so quickly and so loudly, pushing out newspapers and blogs like this one, is to make sure there is no empty space to think too hard about That which leaves Nothing To Be Said.

So thanks to poets like Larkin for some space to think in a frenetic world.


Nothing to be said
(Philip Larkin)

For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.

So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slowly dying.
The day spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party,

Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.

St. Swithin's day

We Sat At The Window
By Thomas Hardy

We sat at the window looking out,
And the rain came down like silken strings
That Swithin's day. Each gutter and spout
Babbled unchecked in the busy way
Of witless things:
Nothing to read, nothing to see
Seemed in that room for her and me
On Swithin's day.

We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes,
For I did not know, nor did she infer
How much there was to read and guess
By her in me, and to see and crown
By me in her.
Wasted were two souls in their prime,
And great was the waste, that July time
When the rain came down.