All Hallows' Eve

 With the Hallowe'en festivities in full swing – bigger, brasher and more ubiquitous with every passing year – who better than R.S. Thomas to spoil the fun? Here he is, in a poem collected in No Truce with the Furies (1995), celebrating the season in his inimitable style...

Hallowe'en

Outside a surfeit of planes.

Inside the hunger of the departed

to come back. ‘Ah, erstwhile humans,

would you make your mistakes

over again? In life, as in love,

the second time round is

no better.’

I confront their expressions

in the embers, on grey walls:

faces among the stones watching

me to see if this night

of all nights I will make sacrifice

to the spirits of hearth and of

roof-tree, pouring a libation.

 ‘Stay where you are,’ I implore.

‘This is no world for escaped beings

to make their way back into.

The well that you took your pails

to is polluted. At the centre

of the mind’s labyrinth the machine howls

for the sacrifice of the affections;

vocabulary has on a soft collar

but the tamed words are not to be trusted.

As long as the flames hum, making

their honey, better to look in

upon truth’s comb than to

take off as we do on fixed wings

for depollinated horizons.’

                

        Happy Hallowe'en, y'all!

 

An Orgy with Muggeridge, and a Missing Wallet

 Kingsley Amis's Memoirs – his self-described 'allobiography' – continues to be tremendous fun, and really not all that different from a conventional autobiography, except for being better written and much funnier. He largely skirts two subjects: his writing and his sex life – certainly not his drinking, which is omnipresent, but put in some kind of perspective by the even more heroic drinkers who feature in the memoir: John Braine, George Gale, Philip Toynbee... Sex, or Kingsley's participation therein, seldom rears its ugly head, but there is a memorable scene in which Malcolm Muggeridge (prior to his canonisation as St Mug) breezily suggests having an 'orgy' in his flat, though only the two of them and Sonia Orwell are present. In the event, both the men prove too comprehensively drunk to make the most of the occasion. 
  Elsewhere, Amis sings the praises of America (as it was when he was there), a country he loved so much he thought seriously of settling there, and he is good on the differences between Oxford, his natural home, and Cambridge, which he did not take to at all in his short residence there. While at Cambridge, he has a letter from another temporary resident, the now forgotten novelist Andrew Sinclair, who has been bombarding Amis with his novels as each of them comes out. 'The letter politely suggested we should meet "in this port and nuts of the soul", i.e., I supposed, Cambridge, a phrase showing signs of hard work, though perhaps not hard enough.' Sinclair invites the Amises to visit him and his wife, but it turns out that, alas, they 'have the builders in', so to the Amises they come. Next time, Sinclair insists, it's his turn – but, sure enough, they still have the builders in, so Amis suggests meeting in a pub:
'When the drinks came, Sinclair plunged his hand confidently into his top inner breast pocket. As in a dream I watched that confidence vanish in an instant, to be as quickly replaced by puzzlement, disbelief, consternation. Soon he was doing an imitation of a free-falling parachutist frenziedly trying to locate his unpulled ripcord. Finally his movements slowed, ceased, and shame possessed him. "I must have left my wallet in my other jacket," he said.'
A common enough scene in Amis's work, but surely never better described. 

Leeds

Venice again! I spotted this luminous painting of the lagoon on the walls of the Leeds City Art Gallery, where, in a room dominated by high Victorian bombast and sentimentality, it stood out like a good deed in a naughty world. The work of John William Inchbold, a favourite of Ruskin's, it was undoubtedly the picture I would have taken home with me, given the chance. But there were other goodies to be seen on this brief visit, including several by John Atkinson Grimshaw (a Leeds man), that master of moonlight and urban crepuscule, Lady Butler's high-impact depiction of the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo (read all about it here), and William Orpen's The Studio [below], a virtuoso exercise in light and shade, which, seen close to, turns out to be composed of surprisingly dry dabs of paint. 

John William Inchbold was also the painter of that magical evocation of the light of early spring, A Study in March [below], which hangs on the walls of the Ashmolean.

As for Leeds itself, a city I hadn't visited in many years, I was greatly impressed, particularly by the architecture – a magnificent array of Victorian work, including fine shopping arcades and grand municipal buildings, and plenty of good stuff from the twentieth century (particularly the Thirties), with only a scattering of the usual ugly multi-storey blocks from more recent times. I was even impressed by a modern shopping arcade, Victoria Leeds, which looked to me like seriously good architecture, but maybe I'm going soft. I'll stop here. 

Another England

 Here's an image from another time – 1956, to be precise (which, as I remember it, was indeed another time, and England another place). It's an advertisement for visiting England, produced by the New York-based British Travel Association, and it shows the Swan in Lavenham, Suffolk, the picture-postcard village where, some years later, Michael Reeves's classic (and deeply disturbing) Witchfinder General was filmed. At the Swan, American visitors are assured, bed and a hearty breakfast – 'orange juice and steaming porridge, eggs and crisp bacon, buttered toast and jam and coffee' – are to be had for $2.40 a night (around £1 sterling). What's more, for $5 a day, gas and oil included, the visitor could hire a 'little English car', perhaps a quaint half-timbered Morris Minor. After that 'gargantuan' breakfast, the advert suggests taking to the road and visiting some other ancient English inns. The itinerary is daunting, taking in  Kent, Hampshire, Hertfordshire and London – and Paradise, the location given for the Adam and Eve pub, and not to be found in any gazetteer. Probably they mean the Adam and Eve in Norwich, which would involve a northward diversion. The British Travel Association, it seems to me, have somewhat underestimated the size of England, and overlooked the clogged state of the country's roads in the 1950s, when you'd be lucky to average much more than 20mph. Still, you could always stop at yet more pubs and sample the beer – described, not very enticingly, as 'interesting and plentiful'. 'The talk is good,' says the BTA optimistically, 'and it's in English. You'll be welcome to play darts and skittles and shove-halfpenny with the natives.' Well, it's a lovely idea of England, even if it bears little relation to reality, even in that far-off world of 1956. 

Bridges

 One book that still turns up surprisingly often on the poetry shelves of charity bookshops and other places where unread books pause on their way to the recycling centre is The Testament of Beauty by Robert Bridges (born on this day in 1844). Its continuing presence is proof of its immense erstwhile popularity: published in 1929, near the end of Bridges's life, it sold in huge numbers (for a volume of verse) and propelled its author, already Poet Laureate, to an O.M. (Order of Merit). I suspect that nowadays, if it is ever plucked from those charity shop shelves, it is rarely actually read. Having dipped into it once or twice, I must confess that I have found it more or less unreadable, but then I am no fan of the 'philosophical poem', which is what The Testament of Beauty very much is. It doesn't help that is written in Alexandrines (six-footed lines) – a form 'that, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along', as Pope put it. This is the kind of thing – 

Time eateth away at many an old delusion,

yet with civilization delusions make head;

the thicket of the people wil take furtiv fire

from irresponsible catchwords of live ideas,

      sudden as a gorse-bush from the smouldering end

of any loiterer’s match-splint, which, unless trodden out

afore it spredd, or quell’d with wieldy threshing-rods

wil burn ten years of planting with all last year’s ricks

and blacken a countryside. ’Tis like enough that men

ignorant of fire and poison should be precondemn’d

to sudden deaths and burnings, but ’tis mightily

to the reproach of Reason that she cannot save

nor guide the herd; that minds who else wer fit to rule

must win to power by flattery and pretence, and so

by spiritual dishonesty in their flurried reign

confirm the disrepute of all authority—

but only in sackcloth can the Muse speak of such things.

The odd spelling, by the way, is Bridges's own; he was an advocate of spelling reform, as well as being a poet, physician, staunch Anglican and hymnodist (his Yattendon Hymnal contained many hymns still sung today). He was also the man who brought the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins to public notice, respite his reservations about Hopkins's wildly unorthodox style and Catholic faith. The two men had been friends since Oxford days, and remained so. 
  One poem of Bridges that has lasted, if only as an anthology piece, is his 'London Snow' – 

When men were all asleep the snow came flying,

In large white flakes falling on the city brown,

Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,

      Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;

Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;

Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:

      Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;

Hiding difference, making unevenness even,

Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.

      All night it fell, and when full inches seven

It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,

The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;

      And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness

Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:

The eye marvelled—marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;

      The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;

No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,

And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.

      Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,

They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze

Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;

      Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;

Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder,

‘O look at the trees!’ they cried, ‘O look at the trees!’

      With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,

Following along the white deserted way,

A country company long dispersed asunder:

      When now already the sun, in pale display

Standing by Paul’s high dome, spread forth below

His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.

      For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;

And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,

Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:

      But even for them awhile no cares encumber

Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,

The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber

At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.

Which puts me in mind of Thomas Hardy's 'Snow in the Suburbs' –

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.

A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eye
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.

The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.

But it's too early for winter poems. It is still, as I noted yesterday, very much autumn. 

A Couple of Autumn Poems

 After a summer which rarely looked the part, and often felt more like winter, at least Autumn is putting on a good show of being autumn, enhanced by some welcome late sunlight. It's a season that has always been popular with poets, though all must labour in the shadow of Keats's glorious 'Ode to Autumn'. 
Here are two contrasting takes on autumn: first John Clare, in upbeat mood, celebrating the season –

I love the fitfull gust that shakes
 The casement all the day
And from the mossy elm tree takes
 The faded leaf away
Twirling it by the window-pane
With thousand others down the lane

I love to see the shaking twig
 Dance till the shut of eve
The sparrow on the cottage rig
 Whose chirp would make believe
That spring was just now flirting by
In summers lap with flowers to lie

I love to see the cottage smoke
 Curl upwards through the naked trees
The pigeons nestled round the coat
 On dull November days like these
The cock upon the dung-hill crowing
The mill sails on the heath a-going

The feather from the ravens breast
 Falls on the stubble lea
The acorns near the old crows nest
 Fall pattering down the tree
The grunting pigs that wait for all
Scramble and hurry where they fall

And here is Philip Larkin – never much of a one for the celebratory mood – describing an urban autumn, in an oddly broken-backed sonnet: 

And now the leaves suddenly lose strength.
Decaying towers stand still, lurid, lanes-long,
And seen from landing windows, or the length
Of gardens, rubricate afternoons. New strong
Rain-bearing night-winds come: then
Leaves chase warm buses, speckle statued air,
Pile up in corners, fetch out vague broomed men
Through mists at morning.
         And no matter where goes down,
The sallow lapsing drift in fields
Or squares behind hoardings, all men hesitate
Separately, always, seeing another year gone –
Frockcoated gentleman, farmer at his gate,
Villein with mattock, soldiers on their shields,
All silent, watching the winter coming on.