Robert Browning, 200 Years Old

Today is the bicentenary of the birth of Robert Browning, an occasion doomed to be all but unnoticed in the blaze of celebration surrounding 2012's other literary bicentennial boy, 'the Inimitable', Charles Dickens. I suppose Browning was never popular in the way Dickens was, despite a clutch of well loved poems - and with the passage of time, he has become more of a writers' writer, enjoyed by a discerning few. The sheer volume of his output, and the length of many of his best poems, is in itself off-putting, but he's worth the effort - at least the poetry of his prime is, and in particular the great dramatic monologues. This was a form he more or less invented, and he brought it to a high pitch of perfection. Here is one of the best, in which the Florentine painter Fra Lippo Lippi (that's a self-portrait - probably - above) is caught in an embarrassing position and, after talking himself out of trouble, launches into a wide-ranging, supple, vividly worded meditation on Life and Art, God and the nature of Beauty. It's long, but hurl yourself in and keep going - reading it, as with so much of Browning at his best, is a bracing, cheering and enriching experience...
'If you get simple beauty and naught else,
You get about the best that God invents.'

My Thoughts on the New England Manager

There's a heading I never thought would appear on this blog. And I must confess that when the dazed, owlish features of Roy Hodgson, England's new football manager, first swam into my ken, I thought Ah here we go again - a home-grown dunce to lead 'the lads' through their latest cycle of well-merited humiliation - and went back to sleep. Since then, however, I have learnt that Hodgson is a cultivated polyglot, widely read in European and English literature - the kind of man who knows and loves Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, and whose favourite books include Josef Skvorecky's The Engineer of Human Souls. And this cultivation is not the product of a university education but of endless curiosity about the world and all that's in it (precisely the kind of curiosity that a university 'education' can kill). None of this will make any difference to the inevitable failure of his England management career - the overpaid, undertalented primadonnas of the Worst Team in the World will continue to lose - but at least Hodgson (unlike almost anyone else in English top-flight football) will have some perspective, and a rich cultural hinterland to fall back on. And he is confirmed in my personal pantheon of Sporting Heroes by another Hodgson fact I've just found out: back in the mid-Seventies, he played full back for Carshalton Athletic (my local team, if I had one). On the team's fan forum, one follower recalls that 'Roy took near-post corners that occasionally worked but were very frustrating when they didn't'. That sound like excellent preparation for his new job.

Sleep Writing

I do a lot of verbal composition in my sleep (we'd noticed - Ed.). On a bad night, this involves an endless round of rewriting and an ever more labyrinthine pursuit of an ever escaping subject - exhausting and frustrating, like far too much of my dream life. However, on rare occasions, I wake with something finished (though not necessarily making any sense). It happened today, when I awoke with this new-minted clerihew about a revered children's writer:
'Michael Morpurgo
Was born under Virgo,
Which might well explain
Why he's so very vain.'
This puts me in mind of the time Dorothy Parker awoke thinking she'd had a profound insight into the human condition and jotted down the lines, 'Hogamus higamus, men are polygamous. Higamus hogamus, women monogamous.'
My clerihew is nonsense of course - Morpurgo is not a Virgo.

Mai, Lieber Mai

As this grim May continues cold, grey, dank and cheerless, here's a little reminder of what this time of year ought to be like, as evoked in sound in this charming little piece by Schumann. In my piano playing boyhood, I used to be able to manage this one, albeit at a rather slower pace (and with a lighter touch).

First Swifts

Yesterday - May Day - evening, I was cheered to see my first swifts of the year. One was just a glimpse, from the train as I neared my station, but the second was a proper sighting - a solitary swift circling busily over the houses at the end of my road. Last year's first swift was several days later, though the weather was far more inviting. It seems that even this cold wet April hasn't put off these most welcome of visitors - and, despite appearances, summer is truly on its way.

Geoffrey Hill, Laureate of Rain

With rain continuing to lash much of the country, my mind turned to the poetry of rain - and thereby to Geoffrey Hill. Our Greatest Living Poet is a veritable laureate of rain. Rain is his res, his thing; no one writes better about English rain in its various moods, its coming and going, its effects on light and leaf and landscape. Skimming through the Selected Works, I compiled this mini-anthology of Hill on Rain, some poetical succour for these drenched days...

'But leave it now, leave it; as you left
a washed-out day at Stourport or the Lickey,
improvised rainhats mulch for papier-mache,
and the chips floating.
Leave it now, leave it; give it over
to that all-gathering general English light,
in which each separate bead
of drizzle at its own thorn-tip stands
as revelation.'
[From The Triumph of Love, which begins and ends with the glorious line 'Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp']

 'Memory worsening - let it go as rain
 streams on half-visible clatter of the wind
                lapsing and rising,
 that clouds the pond's green mistletoe of spawn,
 seeps among nettle-beds and rust-brown sorrel,
 perpetual ivy burrowed by weak light...'
[Sorrel]

'First day of the first week: rain
on perennial ground cover, a sheen
like oil of verdure where the rock shows through;
dark ochre patched more dark, with stubborn glaze;
rough soggy drystone clinging to the fell,
broken by hawthorns...'
[from Speech! Speech!]

 'Two nights' and three days' rain, with the Hodder
 well up, over its alder roots; tumblings
 of shaly late storm light; the despised
 ragwort, luminous, standing out,
 stereoscopically, across twenty yards,
 on the farther bank. The congregants
 of air and water, of swift reflection,
 vanish between the brightness and shadow...'
 [from The Orchards of Syon]

 'Sage-green through olive to oxidised copper,
the rainward stone tower-face. Graveyard
blossom comes off in handfuls; the lilac
turned overnight a rough tobacco brown.
Every few minutes the drizzle shakes itself like a dog...'
 In Ipsley Church Lane, 2]

 'For rain-sprigged yew trees, blockish as they guard
 admonitory sparse berries, atrorubent
 stone holt of darkness, no, of claustral light...'
 [Offertorium]

 'When to depict rain - heavy rain - it stands
in dense verticals diagonally lashed,
chalk-white yet with the chalk translucent;
the roadway sprouts a thousand flowerets,
storm-paddies instantly reaped, replenished,
and again cut down:
the holding burden of a wistaria,
drape amid drape, the sodden
copia of all things flashing and drying:
first here after the storm these butterflies
fixed on each jinking run,
probing, priming, then leaping back,
a babble of silent tongues;
and the flint church also choiring
into dazzle...' [Broken Hierarchies]

 There - feels better already, doesn't it?

Annals of the Parish!

Radio 4's Book at Bedtime has done it again. I've remarked before on BatB's habit of occasionally punctuating its dreary succession of emotionally (and politically) correct contemporary novels with a quite bizarre blast from the past. A while back, it was (of all things) The Ingoldsby Legends. This time, it's the equally improbably Annals of the Parish by John Galt. This quietly humorous chronicle of small-town Scottish life was published in 1821 and much praised by, among others, Coleridge. The story is told in the words of the minister, Rev Micah Balwhidder, and gets off to a lively start when he arrives as the new incumbent and finds himself locked out of his own kirk and obliged to climb in through a window. I shall certainly be listening to this with more interest - and less exasperation - than to most of what turns up on Book at Bedtime. Like The Ingoldsby Legends, Annals of the Parish is one of those books that was once very popular and is now unread, living out a long afterlife on the shelves of charity bookshops. It can only be a matter of time before Radio 4 selects The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table for our bedtime listening pleasure... Meanwhile, over on The Dabbler, I reread J.L Carr's A Month in the Country.