Looking back, I see that ten years ago today I was kicking off a mini-anthology of short poems (designed to keep the blog rolling over during a particularly busy period at work). The first one I put up was this, by Geoffrey Hill – the poem that got me thinking about 'Platonic England', an idea which, adapted to my own purposes, was to inform the book I wrote five years later, The Mother of Beauty: On the Golden Age of English Church Monuments, and Other Matter of Life and Death (still available – just email me if you're interested)...
THE LAUREL AXE
Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods
with smoky wings, entangles them. Trees shine
out from their leaves, rocks mildew to moss-green;
the avenues are spread with brittle floods.
Platonic England, house of solitudes,
rests in its laurels and its injured stone,
replete with complex fortunes that are gone,
beset by dynasties of moods and clouds.
It stands, as though at ease with its own world,
the mannerly extortions, languid praise,
all that devotion long since bought and sold,
the rooms of cedar and soft-thudding baize,
tremulous boudoirs where the crystals kissed
in cabinets of amethyst and frost.
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