Another busy day – mainly filled with form-filling but also including a tutorial and a meeting of our cosmology discussion group – and tonight, for the second week running, I’m off to a lecture at Cardiff Scientific Society. This time it’s by our own Haley Gomez entitled Smoking Supernovae. And here am I trying to give up!
Anyway, I’m going to do what I usually do when I haven’t got time for a proper post and that is put up a bit of poetry. Appropriate for the time of year, in hopeful anticipation of the forthcoming spring, I offer you this (from a poem entitled In February written by Alice Meynell).
Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn,
Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers,
And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers;
A poet’s face asleep in this grey morn.
Now in the midst of the old world forlorn
A mystic child is set in these still hours.
I keep this time, even before the flowers,
Sacred to all the young and the unborn
Since I posted an item about Shelley a couple of days ago I’ll use that as an excuse to post this famous poem by him.It’s a well-known piece, but not a lot of people know that it was actually written in 1817, as part of a sonnet-writing contest between Shelley and Horace Smith.
I wonder why it always makes me think of STFC?
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away”.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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In the Dark 