Peter Porter

Peter Porter, the Australian-born poet, would have been 90 today (he died in 2010). He was a fine poet who deserves to be remembered, and I've written about him here several times.
This elegant sonnet I came across recently in the anthology of church poems, Building Jerusalem. The window that inspired it (pictured above) commemorates H. Rider Haggard, the hugely successful writer of adventure stories (King Solomon's Mines, She, etc.). He was also an agricultural and political reformer, and a Norfolk farmer, who lived near Ditchingham church and was a churchwarden there. The window in his memory was installed in 1925.


The Rider Haggard Window, St Mary, Ditchingham

Time which eats the stories of our lives
Preserves a cruel freshness here to show
How energetic certainty contrives
To tell us what we think we almost know:
The warlike God of England will bestow
At least in retrospect on loyal wives
A school apotheosis, dirge of knives,
With dying, quick in life, in glass made slow.

A dubious transfer this, as history cools,
An ancient trespass, but a change of rules.
The world was opening which today is closed,
And where the mind went, destiny would tread
With God and Science noisily opposed
And story-telling garlanding the dead.