We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.
by R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)
I was tidying up this morning. During this rare episode of fastidiousness, I picked up a book of poetry called A Recipe for Water by Gillian Clarke. Among the lovely poems in this collection are a few inspired by Wales’ Grand Slam in the 2005 Six Nations Rugby. This is one of them, called Number 8. For those of you who aren’t rugby fans, the Number 8 is one of the forwards, the one who plays at the back of the scrum. In fact, it’s the only position that doesn’t have a name (other than “Number 8”); Numbers 1 and 3 are the props, 2 is the hooker, 4 & 5 are the locks, 6 and 7 are the flankers, 9 is the scrum-half, 10 the fly-half, 12 and 13 the inside- and outside-centres respectively, 11 and 14 the wingers and 15 the full-back. But the Number 8 is just the Number 8…
The poem is beautifully descriptive of the classic “pick-and-go” move from a set scrum during which, instead of channelling the ball to the scrum-half, the Number 8 unbinds, picks up the ball and surges forward (usually on the blind side, away from the backs in the three-quarter line).
And sometimes he’ll slip the knot of the scrum
with the ball on his palm, and run with it
hand on heart, out of the mud and bone,
the way a lovely muscle of river
will loosen the branchy tangle
that blocks its way,
and making a break for it flow,
sleek and dangerous
over the weir.
Let no one sing again of love or war.
The order from which the cosmos took its name has been dissolved;
The heavenly legions are a tangle of monsters,
The universe – blind, violent, strange – assails us.
The sky is strewn with horrible dead suns,
Dense sediments of mangled atoms.
Only desperate heaviness emanates from them,
Not energy, not messages, not particles, not light.
Light itself falls back down, broken by its own weight,
And all of us human seed, we live and die for nothing,
The skies perpetually revolve in vain.
by Primo Levi (1919-1987), translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann.
I’ve been thinking of sharing this poem – and especially the superb reading of it by Alan Bates – with you for quite a while. There’s no compelling personal reason for choosing today to so, in fact. I’m not myself labouring in the “fell clutch of circumstance”; neither have the “bludgeonings of chance” fallen particularly hard on my head recently. Nevertheless, this poem has been on my mind for quite a while and, anyway, we all need a bit of inspiration from time to time. This certainly does that job for me, as I hope it will for those who are having a tough time of it these days.
Invictus was written by Victorian poet W.E. Henley as a response to having much of his left leg amputated. I’m not a particular fan of Henley’s verse in general – some of it is unpleasantly jingoistic – but I love this poem’s dignified yet forceful expression of resolute defiance in the face of adversity and injustice. It may be a bit “stiff upper lip” for some of you, but there you go.
Among those who have found solace or inspiration in this poem is Nelson Mandela, who kept it close by during the long years of his incarceration in the dreadful prison on Robben Island, a place I visited on a trip to Cape Town a few years ago; I can tell you that it’s every bit as grim as you might imagine. I’m sure he could teach all of us a thing or two about dignified defiance.
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
And here’s the magnificent reading of the piece by the late Alan Bates.
As often as he let himself be seen
We pitied him, or scorned him, or deplored
The inscrutable profusion of the Lord
Who shaped as one of us a thing so mean—
Who made him human when he might have been
A rat, and so been wholly in accord
With any other creature we abhorred
As always useless and not always clean.
Now he is hiding all alone somewhere,
And in a final hole not ready then;
For now he is among those over there
Who are not coming back to us again.
And we who do the fiction of our share
Say less of rats and rather more of men.
by Edward Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
How’s this for a definition of galaxy?
Torrent of light and river of the air,
Along whose bed the glimmering stars are seen
Like gold and silver sands in some ravine
Where mountain streams have left their channels bare!
The Spaniard sees in thee the pathway, where
His patron saint descended in the sheen
Of his celestial armor, on serene
And quiet nights, when all the heavens were fair.
Not this I see, nor yet the ancient fable
Of Phaeton’s wild course, that scorched the skies
Where’er the hoofs of his hot coursers trod;
But the white drift of worlds o’er chasms of sable,
The star-dust that is whirled aloft and flies
From the invisible chariot-wheels of God
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
Blow, blow, thou winter wind.
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly:
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remember’d not.
Heigh-ho! sing, etc.
From Act II, Scene 7, As You Like It by William Shakespeare.
Well, there you have it. England’s cricketers finally won the final Test of the Ashes series in Sydney by an innings and 83 runs, to win the series outright. It has been a wonderful performance by the England team down under which has warmed the cold English (and Welsh) winter.
Commiserations to Australian cricket fans. Their team just wasn’t as good as England, with bat or ball. They have a lot of rebuilding to do, but you can be sure they’ll be back challenging for the Ashes again before long.
I thought I’d put up a poem to celebrate. This one is called The Game and was written by John Groves. It represents an idyllic view of what many English crickets fans surely regard as the match of any season – the Lord’s Test – which we can now look forward to with relish in the summer. However, I chose this poem for this occasion primarily because of the final couplet which takes us far beyond the boundaries of St John’s Wood.
A painter’s sky over Lord’s.
A gentle zephyr, blowing without brace,
The crowd engaged in all that joy affords
And England batting with admired grace.
The sun ablaze, an unforgiving pitch,
A bowler with a patriotic itch,
A ticking scoreboard and a close-run thing,
A resolute gull, high on a drowsy wing.
Though one team triumph, victory’s all the same:
The winner is the beauty of the game.
So here we are then, it’s “officially” the last day of Christmas.
Last night was Twelfth Night, traditionally marked by an evening of festive merrymaking. And so it came to pass, as I sat with a cup of Ovaltine watching TV highlight’s of the third day’s play in the final Ashes Test in Sydney followed by Match of the Day, featuring coverage of Newcastle’s 5-0 thrashing of West Ham.
Today, 6th January, is Epiphany which traditionally marks the arrival of the three Magi and the presentation of their gifts to the baby Jesus. As far as I’m aware there’s no actual evidence that this actually happened on January 6th, but there you go. It’s a tradition nevertheless. In fact, I seem to remember that the Magi only appear in one of the four gospels (Matthew) and it doesn’t even specify that there were three of them..
Here in the United Kingdom, January 6th is when the holiday season really finishes, when Christmas trees and decorations come down, and when we’re allowed at last to stop eating Turkey curries. Some years ago I discovered that in other countries Epiphany is actually observed rather differently and is in fact one of the main events of the Christmas period. I only discovered this when I tried to arrange a meeting with Spanish and Italian representatives of an EU Network I was involved with on January 6th, only to be greeted with howls of protest. It actually makes sense, though, as presumably the exchanging of gifts at Christmas is supposed to commemorate the visit of the Magi. Why not, therefore, do it at Epiphany?
All this reminded me of the following (very famous) poem, called The Journey of the Magi , by T.S Eliot. I’m all out of gold, frankenstein and myrrh (whatever that is) – and I’m not a particularly wise man anyway – so I’ll offer this in lieu of a gift.
‘A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.’
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped in away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no imformation, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
I should really have posted this before the snow vanished, but I forgot about it..
The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.
World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.
And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.
by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963).
In the Dark 