At Year's End

 Here is a new year/old year poem by the great Richard Wilbur.
The weather here is nothing like so wintry, just windy and damp, but we're promised some cold stuff and clear skies soon... 

Year's End

Now winter downs the dying of the year,   

And night is all a settlement of snow;

From the soft street the rooms of houses show   

A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,   

Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin   

And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake

The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell   

And held in ice as dancers in a spell   

Fluttered all winter long into a lake;   

Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,   

They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns   

Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone   

A million years. Great mammoths overthrown   

Composedly have made their long sojourns,   

Like palaces of patience, in the gray

And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise   

But slept the deeper as the ashes rose

And found the people incomplete, and froze   

The random hands, the loose unready eyes   

Of men expecting yet another sun

To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.   

We fray into the future, rarely wrought

Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

More time, more time. Barrages of applause   

Come muffled from a buried radio.

The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Another Britain, Another World

 One of my Christmas presents was this – About Britain No. 8: East Midlands and the Peak, one of a series of little books produced for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The delightful title page of this one is by Sheila Robinson, one of the Great Bardfield artists, and others in the series are by Kenneth Rowntree and Barbara Jones, among others. The general editor (and author of the first two volumes) was Geoffrey Grigson, one of the last English writers who could fairly be described as a 'man of letters'. The introductory Portrait of the region in my East Midlands volume is written by none other than W.G. Hoskins, author of the classic The Making of the English Landscape. 
  The preface, presumably written by Grigson, breathes the spirit of quiet confidence, hope and national pride that characterised the Festival of Britain: 'The Festival shows how the British people, with their energy and natural resources, contribute to civilisation. So the guide-books as well celebrate a European country alert, ready for the future, and strengthened by a tradition which you can see in its remarkable monuments and products of history and even pre-history.' Over the ensuing decades, that spirit sadly ebbed away, as was demonstrated all too clearly by the farrago of vacuous ahistorical gestures that were the best the cultural panjandrums could come up with to mark the Millennium. 
  Opposite the title page of my volume is this bookplate – another reminder of how long ago the Festival was...

'Not to mistake the men he saw, As others did, for gods or vermin'

 Browsing in Thom Gunn's Poems 1950-1966 in bed last night, I happened on one I hadn't noticed before – 'Epitaph for Anton Schmidt'. With no clear idea of who Anton Schmidt was, I looked him up, and discovered that he was an Austrian who, recruited into the Wehrmacht on the outbreak of the Hitler War, used his position to help Jews in Lithuania, hiding them in his apartment, securing them work permits to save them from the death pits of Ponary (where up to 100,000, mostly Jews, died), aided the underground in the Vilna ghetto, and used Wehrmacht trucks to transfer Jews to safer locations. Having saved some 300 Jews, he was arrested in January 1942, court-martialled, sentenced to death and shot on April 13th. An ordinary-seeming man of no special gifts, described as 'a simple sergeant' and 'a socially awkward man in thought and speech', he seems to have been motivated only by basic human decency, underpinned by a firm Roman Catholic faith. After the war, he was promptly recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, but there was no official commemoration of him in Germany until 2000.  

Epitaph for Anton Schmidt

The Schmidts obeyed, and marched on Poland,
And there an Anton Schmidt, Feldwebel,
Performed uncommon things, not safe,
Nor glamorous, nor profitable.

Was the expression on his face
‘Reposeful and humane good nature’,
Or did he look like any Schmidt
Of slow and undisclosing feature?

I know he had unusual eyes
Whose powers no orders might determine,
Not to mistake the men he saw,
As others did, for gods or vermin.

For five months, till his execution,
Aware that action has its dangers,
He helped the Jews to get away,
– Another race at that, and strangers.

He never did mistake for bondage
The military job, the chances,
The limits; he did not submit
To the blackmail of his circumstance.

I see him in the Polish snow,
His muddy wrappings small protection,
Breathing the cold air of his freedom
And treading a distinct direction.

This is a poem that needs no commentary. I will only draw your attention to the surely unique rhyme of 'Feldwebel' (sergeant) with 'profitable'. And here is a photograph of Anton Schmidt. There is indeed something in those eyes...

Greenstreet

 Today is the anniversary of the birth of Sydney Greenstreet, a remarkable actor with an unusual career path. I wrote about him on this day 11 years ago, which seems like a decent interval, so here's a reprise – and do open the embedded video link to see Greenstreet and Lorre in action in a comic cameo:

https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-late-starter.html 

Happy Christmas

Wishing a very happy Christmas to all who browse here.
The picture is the Nativity at Night by Geertgen tot Sint Jans, painted around 1490. One of the treasures of the National Gallery. 
And here, to accompany it, is Poulenc's beautiful 'O Magnum Mysterium', which I heard sung by the cathedral choir at the wonderful Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols last night.

From the Archives

 Engulfed as usual in Christmas preparations, I took a quick delve in the archives, and came up with this one, from exactly five years ago today. The churchyard in question would have been All Saints, Carshalton...

Strolling through the churchyard (as I often do), I noticed a quotation on a gravestone that was definitely not biblical but was, to me, extremely familiar –

'Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.'

Yes, it's Longfellow again – The Psalm of Life – and the reason it was so familiar to me was that it was one of the bits of strenuously moralistic verse that my father liked to intone while shaving in the morning, in between the much more exciting narrative poems. I don't think he had the whole of this one by heart, but he certainly had the first quatrain:

'Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.'

And, from a little later in Longfellow's overlong effusion:

'Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.'

(That last line was rewritten by some later poetical wag as 'Arseprints in the sands of time'.)

Another of my father's favourites in this moralising line was

'Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.'

The Queen herself quoted these lines in her Christmas message at the end of her annus horribilis of 1992, but didn't mention the author – not Longfellow but Adam Lindsay Gordon.
  Gordon was an interesting, rather dashing figure – an Englishman who, to escape the consequences of a wild and reckless youth, took passage to Australia, where he became a police officer before resigning to take up horse-breaking. A remarkable horseman and amateur jockey, he also had a brief political career. According to Wikipedia, 'his semiclassical speeches were colourful and entertaining, but largely irrelevant.' After this, he devoted himself more diligently to poetry – Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes being his chief claim to (posthumous) fame – while suffering various setbacks, including a head injury from a riding accident and chronic financial difficulties. In 1870, at the age of 36, he walked into the bush and shot himself.  He is now regarded as one of the fathers of Australian literature, even though much of his verse has been written off as quite indefensibly bad.

The Missing Act

In Derby with half an hour to kill, I stepped into the city museum and art gallery, home to the country's finest collection of works by Joseph Wright. But before I could visit the Wrights, my attention was caught by a temporary exhibition, The Missing Act, of paintings by a young artist called Max Gimson, of whom I had never heard, but who is the latest winner of the Jonathan Vickers Fine Art Award. I had no idea what to expect – and I was in for a pleasant surprise. The Missing Act is an exhibition of paintings inspired by the now derelict Derby Hippodrome, drawing on its archive of programmes, production stills and publicity photographs. The image above, for example, is of Bela Lugosi relaxing backstage between performances (as Dracula, hence the trickle of stage blood). It put me in mind – as did many of the pictures in the exhibition – of Walter Sickert's theatrical scenes, though Gimson's palette is brighter than Sickert's, more like Harold Gilman's, and his drawing is generally broader, not to say cruder. There are even faint echoes of early Hockney and of Kitaj. Gimson's approach is essentially figurative, but he likes to mix things up, playing with scale, with foreground and background, and often leaving you wondering quite what it is you're looking at. He sees his pictures less as representations than as 'sets of relationships between space, colour, texture and form' (of all of which there is plenty). When painting, he likes to achieve a state where 'thought and intention go out of the window', accidents and mistakes happen, the work in progress achieves a kind of autonomy, and in the end the finished painting somehow comes into being: this is what the title 'The Missing Act' refers to. 
  Some of the pictures on display are more successful than others, but almost all of them gave me a real thrill of aesthetic pleasure – and what more can you ask? Here is one of the more straightforward pictures – 'Romance' –

And here is something harder to read – 'Marie Lloyd Between Dandelions' – 

Gimson says his paintings are 'intended to evoke the atmosphere of a location' (in this case, the Derby Hippodrome), and this they certainly do. But, more than that, they evoke a time – the lost age of the variety theatre – and they do it far more effectively than photographs could, creating something strange and rather beautiful from the source material. I'm very glad I happened upon this hugely enjoyable exhibition. If you find yourself in Derby, do go and have a look...

A Haddock Tomb

 I was cheered this morning to see a story about Historic England's listing of an 'exceptionally rare' group of 17th-century chest tombs in the churchyard of St Clement's, Leigh-on-Sea in Essex. This is 'my' period, of course, as readers of The Mother of Beauty will know (and just to say, it's the ideal stocking filler – still available on Amazon, or from me at nigeandrew@gmail.com). One of these Essex tombs is of Mary Haddock, mother of Admiral Richard Haddock, a prominent commander in the Anglo-Dutch wars, and very probably one of the inspirations for Hergé's great creation, Captain Haddock. Alongside her tomb is that of her father, a whaler, and a third tomb commemorates one Mary Ellis, believed to have lived 119 years and died 'a virgin of virtuous courage and very promising hope'. Her tomb, being that of a single, childless woman, 'stands as a remarkable challenge to 17th-century gender norms', according to Historic England. Really? I'm sure I've seen plenty of 17th-century monuments to single, childless women (of impeccable virtue, needless to say). 
Read the whole story here... 

'At this moment, and not before, I lost consciousness...'

 When I was still in the world of work, toiling away in the engine rooms of NigeCorp, December (as long-time readers might recall) was always an especially busy and exhausting month, thanks to the demands of a looming Xmastide. I fondly thought that perhaps, when I retired, things would be quieter and I would have ample time to attend to the blog and other congenial activities. Needless to say, it has not panned out like that, and December remains almost as busy and exhausting as ever, albeit in different ways (and it does beat being chained to my editorial oar at NigeCorp). Anyway, all this is by way of saying that blog posting might be a bit spotty for a while, and I might even resort to the occasional raid on the archives: I certainly shall today, as the birthday of Humphry Davy (born 1778) gives me the perfect excuse to republish this account, from ten years ago, of the great Cornishman's amazing adventures with laughing gas...

'I see that Nitrous Oxide - 'laughing gas' - is in fashion again, just as it was back in the 1790s, though it was then enjoyed by a rather more select band of enthusiasts.
 At the Pneumatic Institute, the brainchild of Dr Thomas Beddoes (father of that strange poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes), in Bristol, the young scientific whiz kid Humphry Davy was throwing himself into the grand project of experimenting with Nitrous Oxide. The hope was that it would have near-miraculous therapeutic properties - and who knew what other uses - and Davy was keen to experiment on himself (as he had already done with Carbon Monoxide, with very nearly fatal results) to find out its effects.
 After inhaling four quarts, Davy noted 'highly pleasurable thrilling, particularly in the chest and extremities. The objects around me became dazzling, and my hearing more acute... Sometimes I manifested my pleasure by stamping or laughing only; at other times, by dancing around the room and vociferating... This gas raised my pulse upwards of twenty strokes, made me dance about the laboratory as a madman, and has kept my spirits in a glow ever since.'
 No wonder he was keen to press on. 'Between April and June I constantly breathed the gas sometimes three or four times a day for a week... I have often felt very great pleasure when breathing it alone, in darkness and silence, occupied only by ideal existence.' What, he wondered, would be the effect of an overdose? After inhaling a full six quarts, he noted that 'the pleasurable sensation was at first local, and perceived in the lips and the cheeks. It gradually, however, diffused itself over the whole body, and in the middle of the experiment was for a moment so intense and pure as to absorb existence. At this moment, and not before, I lost consciousness; it was, however, quickly restored, and I endeavoured to make a bystander acquainted with the pleasures I experienced by laughing and stamping. I had no vivid ideas.'
 Pressing on, he was soon making use of a portable gas chamber designed by James Watt, which enabled him to inhale eight quarts over a planned 75 minutes before being released from the chamber (with his pulse at 124, his temperature 106 and his face bright purple) and given a top-up of 20 quarts of pure gas. 'The sensations were superior to any I ever experienced. Inconceivably pleasurable,' he noted. 'Theories passed rapidly thro the mind, believed I may say intensely, at the same time that everything going on in the room was perceived. I seemed to be a sublime being, newly created and superior to other mortals, I was indignant at what they said of me and stalked majestically out of the laboratory to inform Dr Kinglake privately that nothing existed but thoughts.'
 After some more experiments testing the effects of combining alcohol with nitrous oxide - it seems it's good for hangovers - Davy ended this self-experimenting phase, happily unscathed and with his mind sharper than ever.
 The Pneumatic Institute was popular also with artists and writers, and Coleridge was among those sampling the laughing gas, noting 'an highly pleasurable sensation of warmth over my whole frame, resembling what I remember once to have experienced after returning from a walk in the snow into a warm room'. But he also felt, he wrote, 'more unmingled pleasure than I had ever before experienced'.
 Robert Southey, who was to develop into a sedate and respectable Poet Laureate, was quite esctatic in his reactions to the gas, writing to his brother Tom: 'O, Tom! Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxide. Oh, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure, for which language has no name. Oh, Tom! I am going for more this evening! It makes one strong and happy! So gloriously happy!'
 Surely science was never such fun again.
 [For more on all this - among many other things - see Richard Holmes's marvellous The Age of Wonder.]

Sebald RIP

 This is the somewhat austere gravestone of W.G. Sebald, who died in this day in 2001. It stands in the churchyard of St Andrew's, Framlingham Earl, a round-towered Norfolk church. Sebald lived nearby, in the old rectory of Poringland, described as 'a long, unattractive village' a few miles south of Norwich. As well as being shocking and premature, his death also seemed wildly incongruous: Sebald, so much the quintessential pedestrian – The Rings of Saturn is, among much else, the chronicle of a great walk – died at the wheel of his car, having suffered a heart attack and swerved into the path of an oncoming vehicle. Mercifully, his daughter, who was in the car with him, survived. 
  I discovered Sebald late, nearly a decade after his death, but, once I had found him, I read everything of his I could get my hands on. I would place him among the handful of recent authors whose works – at least Austerlitz, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn –  I would save from the ruins. 

'A strange, ingenious compound of dulness and danger'

 When the evening torpor has fully set in and there is nothing to be done about it, I often find myself watching 24 Hours in A&E (on Ch4 or its affiliates). On the face of it, this is just another documentary series celebrating the heroic work of those on the front line of emergency medicine, but 24 Hours, I would sleepily contend, is different, and a much more satisfying watch – chiefly because it introduces us to the patients as people, following up on their stories and telling something, often surprising and revealing, of their backgrounds and struggles in life. Sure, it's emotionally manipulative and it shows the NHS in an all too flattering light, and of course it has little to do with the actual hellish experience of waiting your turn in an A&E department – but these human stories are genuinely heartening, and show that we humans are most of us not so bad after all, and some of us positively heroic. Or maybe I'm just going soft in the head. 
  Anyway, week after week, one of the main causes of the often life-threatening accidents that land people in A&E is the bicycle (others are ladders, stairs, motorbikes and alcohol, all of which should of course be banned by our caring government – first step: replace everybody's stairs with solar-powered lifts...). The bicycle was a machine of which Max Beerbhom took a dim view. In an essay, 'Fashion and Her Bicycle' (collected in More), he casts a cool eye on the fashion for bicycling, hoping that it is a passing craze. Fashion, he hopes, 'will remember it only as a horrid penance. Already she has dropped it from her conversation; Rudge, Humber, Singer – she cares no longer to discriminate between machines which are, one and all of them, the devil's own patent. Indeed, she thinks, bicycling was ever the most tedious topic of conversation. It was also the most tedious form of exercise, save walking, known to the human race. It was but a strange, ingenious compound of dulness and danger.' The bicycle, he notes, 'kills some of its riders, and bores the rest'. 
  Beerbohm recognises, however, that the bicycle will endure, even after it has fallen out of fashion. 'Some things were created by Fashion herself, and perished so soon as she was weary of them. Others, merely adopted by her, are more abiding. Golf, for example, as the most perfect expression of national stupidity, has an assured, unchequered future ... and bicycling, as a symptom of that locomotomania produced by usage of steam, will endure "till we go back to the old coaches".' How right he was. As for Fashion, Max wonders what will next attract her attention: 'There are many things for her selection. The concertina is a rather nice instrument. Stilts are not to be despised. Mohammedanism is said to be fascinating, and so are tip-cat and the tight-rope.'

'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.  

Singing, Dancing, Singing

 The other day I came across this charming little poem by Iain Crichton Smith –

Two Girls Singing

It neither was the words nor yet the tune
Any tune would have done and any words.
Any listener at all.

As nightingales in rocks or a child crooning
in its own world of strange awakening
or larks for no reason but themselves.

So on the bus through late November running
by yellow lights tormented, darkness falling,
the two girls sang for miles and miles together

and it wasn't the words or the tune. It was the singing.
It was the human sweetness in that yellow,
the unpredicted voices of our kind.

It reminded me of the Lawrence Binyon poem I put up recently, also about a joyful, spontaneous performance (again with no audience in mind) – this time of dancing, rather than singing... 

The Little Dancers

Lonely, save for a few faint stars, the sky
Dreams; and lonely, below, the little street
Into its gloom retires, secluded and shy.
Scarcely the dumb roar enters this soft retreat;
And all is dark, save where come flooding rays
From a tavern window; there, to the brisk measure
Of an organ that down in an alley merrily plays,
Two children, all alone and no one by,
Holding their tattered frocks, thro' an airy maze
Of motion lightly threaded with nimble feet
Dance sedately; face to face they gaze,
Their eyes shining, grave with a perfect pleasure.

There is something peculiarly moving and joyful in these moments, beautifully expressed by Siegfried Sassoon in his most famous poem, 'Everyone Sang' – 

 Everyone suddenly burst out singing;

And I was filled with such delight

As prisoned birds must find in freedom,

Winging wildly across the white

Orchards and dark-green fields; on – on – and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;

And beauty came like the setting sun:

My heart was shaken with tears; and horror

Drifted away ... O, but Everyone

Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Sassoon's poem reads as if it was written in an exalted state, in the glorious afterglow of the experience he describes. However, its genesis was very different, as he recalls in his memoir Siegfried's Journey: 

'One evening in the middle of April I had an experience which seems worth describing for those who are interested in methods of poetic production. It was a sultry spring night. I was feeling dull-minded and depressed, for no assignable reason. After sitting lethargically in the ground-floor room [at Weirleigh, his mother's home] for about three hours after dinner, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing for it but to take my useless brain to bed. On my way from the arm-chair to the door I stood by the writing-table. A few words floated into my head as though from nowhere. In those days I was always on the look-out for a lyric – I wish I could say the same for my present self – so I picked up a pencil and wrote the words on a sheet of note-paper. Without sitting down, I added a second line. It was if I were remembering rather than thinking. In this mindless manner I wrote down my poem in a few minutes. When it was finished I read it through, with no sense of elation, merely wondering how I had come to be writing a poem when feeling so stupid.'

The birth of a poem is indeed a mysterious event...