'It is the old kingdom of man'

 One of my birthday presents was The Accidental Garden, a short book by Richard Mabey, who, at 83, is still the doyen of the ever growing tribe of English nature writers. The Accidental Garden begins with a quotation from R.S. Thomas – surely a good sign – in which the poet describes a garden as 'a gesture against the wild,/ The ungovernable sea of grass'. This, says Mabey, 'sounds pretty much like a summary of the whole human project on planet Earth. We still struggle to find a gesture in our relations with the natural world which is more like a handshake than a clenched fist.'
  The quotation is from this 14-line poem, 'The Garden' – 

It is a gesture against the wild,
The ungovernable sea of grass;
A place to remember love in,
To be lonely for a while;
To forget the voices of children
Calling from a locked room;
To substitute for the care
Of one querulous human
Hundreds of dumb needs.

It is the old kingdom of man.
Answering to their names,
Out of the soil the buds come,
The silent detonations
Of power wielded without sin.

Emily Dickinson, who was born on this day in 1830, was a keen and expert gardener, and a passionate garden lover: 'I was reared in the garden, you know', she wrote in a letter to her cousin Louisa Norcross. With her mother and her sister Lavinia, she worked wonders in the garden and conservatory of the Amherst Homestead. Here, to make a pair with Thomas's, is one of Emily's garden poems, 'In the Garden' –

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, —
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.

Now there's an image – the splashless leap of butterflies – as potent as the silent detonations of Thomas's buds. 

'Who knows if Jove who counts our Score will toss us in a morning more?'

 It's not often that I have occasion to mark an anniversary from the era we traditionalists still call 'BC' –but today is the birthday, in 65BC, of Horace, the Latin poet who was more widely read, 'imitated' and translated in England than any other (with the possible exception of Virgil). In the seventeenth and, especially, eighteenth century, he virtually became one of the English poets, and in the 19th century Gladstone was one of many who habitually read and translated him, in his case while also serving as Prime Minister – those days are long gone, that's for sure... Pope wrote a fine set of eleven Imitations of Horace, and one of Marvell's greatest poems was Horace-inspired – the endlessly subtle, touching and ironic 'An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland'. 
  As for Samuel Johnson, he read and translated Horace – especially the Odes – all his life, from his schooldays to near the end. It was in his final months that he wrote this translation of Ode 7 from Book 4, with its strong theme of mortality and the transience of things – 

The snow dissolv'd no more is seen,
The fields, and woods, behold, are green,
The changing year renews the plain,
The rivers know their banks again,

The sprightly Nymph and naked Grace
The mazy dance together trace.
The changing year's successive plan,
Proclaims mortality to Man.

Rough Winter's blasts to Spring give way,
Spring yields to Summer's sovereign ray,
Then Summer sinks in Autumn's reign,
And Winter chills the world again.

Her losses soon the Moon supplies,
But wretched Man, when once he lies
Where Priam and his sons are laid,
Is nought but Ashes and a Shade.

Who knows if Jove who counts our Score
Will toss us in a morning more?
What with your friend you nobly share
At least you rescue from your heir.

Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome,
When Minos once has fix'd your doom,
Or Eloquence, or splendid birth,
Or Virtue shall replace on earth.

Hippolytus unjustly slain
Diana calls to life in vain,
Nor can the might of Theseus rend
The chains of hell that hold his friend.

A.E. Housman regarded this ode of Horace's as 'the most beautiful poem in ancient literature', and he produced a beautiful translation of it himself –

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

The Nymphs and Graces three put off their fear
And unapparelled in the woodland play.
The swift hour and the brief prime of the year
Say to the soul, Thou wast not born for aye.

Thaw follows frost; hard on the heel of spring
Treads summer sure to die, for hard on hers
Comes autumn with his apples scattering;
Then back to wintertide, when nothing stirs.

But oh, whate'er the sky-led seasons mar,
Moon upon moon rebuilds it with her beams;
Come we where Tullus and where Ancus are
And good Aeneas, we are dust and dreams.

Torquatus, if the gods in heaven shall add
The morrow to the day, what tongue has told?
Feast then thy heart, for what thy heart has had
The fingers of no heir will ever hold.

When thou descendest once the shades among,
The stern assize and equal judgment o'er,
Not thy long lineage nor thy golden tongue,
No, nor thy righteousness, shall friend thee more.

Night holds Hippolytus the pure of stain,
Diana steads him nothing, he must stay;
And Theseus leaves Pirithous in the chain
The love of comrades cannot take away.

In the 20th century, Patrick Leigh Fermor was a devoted reader of Horace – in the original Latin, of course – and his knowledge of the Odes formed an extraordinary and wholly unexpected bond with General Kreipe, the German officer Paddy and his partisan comrades had just kidnapped on Crete in 1944. They took him to an overnight hideout in a cave on Mount Ida, and when in the morning Kreipe saw the landscape around, he muttered the opening lines of Horace's Ode XI.I: 

'Vides ut alta stet nive candidum,
Soracte nec iam sustineant onus…'

Leigh Fermor finished the stanza for him:

'Silvae laborantes geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto.'

Being Paddy, he also knew by heart all five of the following stanzas, and recited them to the astonished Kreipe. As Leigh Fermor notes in his memoir:

'For five minutes the war had evaporated without a trace.'

Another

 Well, it's another birthday for me and old Tom Waits – and a bit of a milestone, being the 75th. Three quarters of a century on this earth! As so often at this time of year, I've been somewhat prostrated – some kind of cold/flu/whatever – but have rallied in time to greet the day, and the wind and rain of Storm Darragh, though mercifully we're on the fringes of it here. I wonder what Tom's up to...
  Yesterday, as I lay on my bed of pain – actually, my sofa of no pain – I heard much of Sean Rafferty's final edition of In Tune on Radio 3. It was one big musical party, with guests galore, all bursting with genuine affection for Sean, the most genial and urbane of music presenters, and the best interviewer of musicians Radio 3 ever had. Needless to say, Radio 3's management didn't value what they had and the latest incoming Controller promptly announced his intention of moving him to other duties from April next year. Sean, understandably, decided not to hang around awaiting the coup de grace. I hope very much we haven't heard the last of him. In Tune will never be the same again, and Rafferty will be sorely missed. 

Larkin, 'the Peg's Paper sonneteer'

 'God, this place is dull,' the young Philip Larkin declared in a letter to his friend Jim Sutton, after the Larkins had temporarily left blitzed Coventry in October 1940 and moved in with family in... Lichfield, where generations of Larkins had lived and died (many are in St Michael's churchyard). Dull it doubtless was, like any provincial town at the time, but young Philip whiled away the time drinking in the George Hotel and The Swan, then a hotel, now divided into apartments, plus a branch of Ask Italian (nice garden) and a wine bar. Larkin wrote three poems during his time in Lichfield – all essentially juvenilia, but one, I think, showing a glimmer of what was to be. This is 'Ghosts', which was probably inspired by the story of a ghostly White Lady who appeared from time to time at or near The Swan, which overlooks a corner of Beacon Park...

They said this corner of the park was haunted,
At tea today, laughing through windows at
The frozen landscape. One of them recounted
The local tale: easy where he sat
With lifted cup, rocked in the servile flow
Of disbelief around, to understand
And bruise. But something touched a few
Like a slim wind with an accusing hand –
Cold as this tree I touch. They knew, as I,
Those living ghosts who cannot leave their dreams,
And in years after and before their death
Return as they can, and with ghost’s pleasure search
Those several happy acres, or those rooms
Where, like unwilling moth, they collided with
The enormous flame that blinded and hurt too much.

Including the poem in a letter to Jim Sutton, Larkin glossed 'Ghosts' thus: 
‘Have just written the above in about ½ hour – actually a great speed. Lousily technically done, but I wanted to send it to you to show you my real talent – not the truly strong man but the fin de siècle romantic, not the clinically austere but the Peg’s Paper* sonneteer, not Auden but Rupert Brooke.’
A harsh judgment surely: those closing lines are really rather good, and give a definite sense of the mature Larkin in the making. And it's hard to believe that this  15-line sonnet with its well disguised scheme of rhymes and half-rhymes was written in half an hour. 

 
* Peg's Paper was an escapist magazine aimed at working-class girls and filled with tales of love across the class divide.  It ran from 1919 to 1940. 

Off the Wall

For me, visiting Tate Britain used to be one of the unalloyed pleasures of London life – but that was some while ago, before the once great gallery began its headlong descent into wraparound ultrawokeness. I can't remember when they last held an exhibition that I felt any strong urge to visit, and the sermonising captions telling us what to think about individual works of art – e.g. this – are enough to put anyone off the whole idea of going to art galleries. There's an interesting piece in the current Spectator about the parlous state Tate Britain now finds itself in, with a huge financial deficit and visitor numbers dangerously low. The author, J.J. Charlesworth, is surely right in identifying the Tate's relentless wokery and deeply unattractive exhibition programme as the main cause of this dire situation, and one wonders what will be done about it, if anything. The supertanker of wokery – at the Tate and elsewhere – will not be easy to turn around, even if anyone wants to, and at present they probably don't.
Anyway, in the course of this article I was startled to learn that one of the most important paintings in Tate Britain's collection – Stanley Spencer's The Resurrection, Cookham – has been removed from display and put in storage. I'm not a huge fan of Spencer, but I recognise a masterpiece when I see one, and this strange resurrection scene is surely one of the great English paintings of its time – and of course it belongs on the walls of our major gallery of British art. But perhaps we should have seen this coming: when it was still on display, The Resurrection was saddled with a caption explaining that 'Most of the white people are local friends or specific biblical figures. By contrast, Spencer represents the group of Black people at the centre of the painting in a generalising way. They are not based on people he knew, but on images he saw in National Geographic magazine. Spencer intended to show that all humanity would be included in the resurrection, but in trying to make this point he reinforced racist stereotypes and divisions accepted at the time by most white British people.'
Poor old Spencer. If only he'd taken the trouble to befriend some leading members of 1920s Cookham's vibrant Afro-Caribbean community, his work might still be hanging in its proper place.