Friday, 14 February 2025

'And everywhere that spacious blue...'

 Valentine's Day again, so I guess a love poem is called for. Very few modern poets, I think, can write anything very convincing in this line. However, one who can is Dick Davis. Here is his great love poem, Uxor Vivamus...

The first night that I slept with you

And slept, I dreamt (these lines are true):

Now newly married we had moved

Into an unkempt house we loved –

The rooms were large, the floors of stone,

The garden gently overgrown

With sunflowers, phlox, and mignonette –

All as we would have wished and yet

There was a shabby something there

Tainting the mild and windless air.

Where did it lurk?  Alarmed we saw

The walls about us held the flaw –

They were of plaster, like grey chalk,

Porous and dead:  it seemed our talk,

Our glances, even love, would die

With such indifference standing by.

Then, scarcely thinking what I did,

I chipped the plaster and it slid

In easy pieces to the floor;

It crumbed cleanly, more and more

Fell unresistingly away –

And there, beneath that deadening grey,

A fresco stood revealed:  sky-blue

Predominated, for the view

Was of an ebullient country scene,

The crowning of some pageant queen

Whose dress shone blue, and over all

The summer sky filled half the wall.

And so it was in every room,

The plaster’s undistinguished gloom

Gave way to dances, festivals,

Processions, muted pastorals –

And everywhere that spacious blue:

I woke, and lying next to you

Knew all that I had dreamt was true.

Thursday, 13 February 2025

Those Eyes...

 This haunting image is the so-called Mona Lisa of the Depths, a daguerrotype of an unknown woman that was found in the wreck of the SS Central America, lying on the ocean bed off the coast of South Carolina. The ship sank in a hurricane in September 1857, with the loss of 425 lives and some 30,000lb of gold. The wreck was located in 1988, with the aid of Bayesian search theory (whatever that is – more than once I've had a brief sense of understanding Bayesian statistics, but it soon passes), and gold to the value of $100-150 million was salvaged. And so was the Mona Lisa of the Depths, an extraordinary survival and a portrait of rare intensity and directness. She seems, truly, a 'living likeness'. Those eyes...

Wednesday, 12 February 2025

'the curiosity is satisfied and the sale has dropped...'

 In April 1817 Charles Ollier, Keats's first publisher, wrote thus to the poet's brother George: 

'Sir, – We regret that your brother ever requested us to publish his book, or that our opinion of its talent should have led us to acquiesce in undertaking it. We are, however, much obliged to you for relieving us from the unpleasant necessity of declining any further connexion with it which we must have done, as we think the curiosity is satisfied and the sale has dropped. – By far the greater number of Persons who have purchased it from us have found fault with it in such plain terms, that we have in many cases offer'd to take the book back rather than be annoyed with the ridicule which has, time after time, been shower'd on it...'

The book was Poems (1817), Keats's first publication, a volume which contains one of the greatest sonnets in the language – this:

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Poems did initially attract a couple of good reviews, but was duly shot down by Blackwood's Magazine, largely because of Keats's association with  the enemy, i.e. Leigh Hunt. Hunt himself declared that the Chapman's Homer sonnet 'completely announced the new poet taking possession'. He was right. 
By the way, if anyone fancies owning the first edition of Poems, in its original boards, there's one on the market now for just shy of £50,000.

Monday, 10 February 2025

Keep On Punning

 I see that the UK Pun Championships are taking place this evening, as part of the Leicester Comedy Festival. Good to know that this much maligned form of wit – not the lowest but potentially one of the highest – is being celebrated in this annual event. 
In literature, the pun has a distinguished history – Shakespeare's plays and sonnets are full of puns – and perhaps achieved its most evolved form, much later, in Flann O'Brien's tales of Keats and Chapman, each beautifully detailed anecdote crafted to end in a fantastically ingenious punning pay-off line. Here is a fine example: 

'Around the time that Chapman was becoming disillusioned with his friend Keats’s flock of dotterels, acquired for seven and six from a man in the Dandelion Market and put out to roost in their back garden, the birds redeemed themselves by showing an unexpected talent as gentlemen’s outfitters. Picking up the large quantities of thread and fabric that Keats liked to keep lying around the place in the garden, God only knows why, the birds would get to work and several hours later would have produced a dazzling array of formal neckwear. The products of their labours, it must be said, were not in the best of taste. The colour schemes were gaudy and the patterns in the ‘novelty’ genre beloved of salesmen on their way to office Christmas parties and other such occasions. Yet the public went wild for their designs, especially a garish green number known as the ‘Happy Leprechaun’. Why, even Eamon de Valera was spotted wearing one. Sitting in their kitchen one day, our heroes discussed these changes in gentlemen’s fashions. ‘All is changed, changed dotterelly’, observed Keats. ‘A terrible bow-tie is born’, agreed Chapman.'

But for sheer pun firepower, surely no one ever equalled the Victorian poet Thomas Hood, as in this virtuoso performance, Faithless Nelly Gray: A Pathetic Ballad

'Ben Battle was a soldier bold,
And used to war's alarms;
But a cannon-ball took off his legs,
So he laid down his arms.

Now, as they bore him off the field,
Said he, "Let others shoot;
For here I leave my second leg,
And the Forty-second Foot!"

The army-surgeons made him limbs:
Said he, "They're only pegs;
But there's as wooden members quite
As represent my legs!"

Now, Ben he loved a pretty maid,
Her name was Nelly Gray;
So he went to pay his devours,
When he devoured his pay!

But when he called on Nelly Gray,
She made him quite a scoff;
And when she saw his wooden legs,
Began to take them off!

"O, Nelly Gray! O, Nelly Gray!
Is this your love so warm?
The love that loves a scarlet coat
Should be more uniform!"

Said she, "I loved a soldier once
For he was blithe and brave;
But I will never have a man
With both legs in the grave!

"Before you had those timber toes,
Your love I did allow;
But then, you know, you stand upon
Another footing now!"

"O, Nelly Gray! O, Nelly Gray!
For all your jeering speeches,
At duty's call I left my legs
In Badajos's breaches !"

"Why then," said she, "you've lost the feet
Of legs in war's alarms,
And now you cannot wear your shoes
Upon your feats of arms!"

"O, false and fickle Nelly Gray!
I know why you refuse: –
Though I've no feet – some other man
Is standing in my shoes!

"I wish I ne'er had seen your face;
But, now, a long farewell!
For you will be my death; – alas
You will not be my Nell!"

Now, when he went from Nelly Gray,
His heart so heavy got,
And life was such a burden grown,
It made him take a knot!

So round his melancholy neck
A rope he did entwine,
And, for his second time in life,
Enlisted in the Line.

One end he tied around a beam,
And then removed his pegs,
And, as his legs were off – of course
He soon was off his legs!

And there he hung, till he was dead
As any nail in town –
For, though distress had cut him up,
It could not cut him down!

A dozen men sat on his corpse,
To find out why he died –
And they buried Ben in four cross-roads
With a stake in his inside!'


It is, I suppose, possible to have too many puns...


Sunday, 9 February 2025

An 'Incident'

 Browsing in the Lichfield & Burntwood Independent, I came across the headline 'Police seek to reassure residents after incident'. Oh dear, I thought, what could that have been?
It was this: on Market Street the other day, a group of 'around six males' had chased another group 'for no reason'. Admittedly they appeared to have their faces covered, which must have looked slightly alarming, but no one was injured and no threats were made. The police were quick off the mark in responding, and are now busy 'working proactively in the area to reassure residents' and 'taking steps to address concerns proactively across the city'. It's things like this that make me so glad to be living in Lichfield rather than London. Even in the leafy suburb (the Demiparadise) where I lived, an 'incident' like this would never have made page 8 of the local paper; it wouldn't have made the paper at all, nor would the police be 'proactively' reassuring residents. Those days are long gone. Now, even a stabbing would most likely be a small story on an inside page. 
Also in the L & B Independent, I see that the excellent local history group Lichfield Discovered is setting up a heritage 'hub' – in the Schoolmaster's House (dating back to 1682) of Lichfield grammar school, where Samuel Johnson and David Garrick were pupils. Ah, Lichfield...

Friday, 7 February 2025

Calamity!

 This, believe it or not, is Thomas Carlyle, having a bit of a meltdown. As the caption explains, 'A dog knocked over the lamp on the table which held Carlyle's important papers on which he had worked for many years. His manuscript caught fire, turned to ash, and Carlyle became sick from depression. In the end, everything still turned out great.' 
  The picture is one of a series of prints produced by the Japanese Department of Education in the 1870s, when Japan was westernising and introducing its population to those crazy westerners and their wacky ways. Each of the prints shows a western innovator suffering some kind of setback, which would in due course be overcome by persistence and hard work, so that 'in the end, everything still turned out great'.  
 The question is: did a dog-related incident result in any of Carlyle's papers being burnt? The Carlyles certainly had a dog, called Nero, who appears in a famous portrait of the unhappy couple at home – A Chelsea Interior by Robert Scott Tait – but he bears no resemblance to the beast in the Japanese print:

And there is no record of Nero causing any fires. However, Carlyle did suffer a manuscript-burning catastrophe when he gave a first draft of his magnum opus The French Revolution to John Stuart Mill and a housemaid mistook it for waste paper and threw it on the fire. A hysterical Mill rushed to Carlyle's house to tell the terrible tale and witness the great man's reaction, which was volcanic. However, when the volcano had died down, Carlyle got down to work and rewrote the whole thing – and yes, in the end, everything still turned out great. 
  There is more on these remarkable educational prints on the wonderful Public Domain Review website. 

Wednesday, 5 February 2025

Happiness, and the Case for Verse

 Here is Dick Davis pondering happiness again, in a poem titled 'Can We?' –

Can we convincingly pretend,
And not to others but ourselves,
That we are happy? And if we could,
Would that mean that we were, pro tem,
Uncomplicatedly, just that,
Happy? And what would that be like?
The mind runs through its obvious
Loved carnal candidates... Well, maybe,
But probably it would resemble

Less some celestial debauch
With someone quite phenomenal
Than being in a symphony
By Haydn: having all of it – 
It doesn't matter much which one –
The whole ebullient edifice,
Just there, available and real,
Impossibly to hand, forever.

And here he is on poetry: 

Preferences

    To my surprise
I've come to realise
I don't like poetry

    (Dear, drunkly woozy,
Accommodating floozy
That she's obliged to be,

    Poor girl, these days).
No, what I love and praise
Is not damp poetry
    But her pert, terse,
Accomplished sibling: verse.
She's the right girl for me.

The opening of that one recalls Marianne Moore's famous poem, 'Poetry', which begins 'I, too, dislike it', but Davis's message is simpler: he prefers verse to 'poetry', as it is now understood. And it's hard no to agree: 'poetry', in an age that values self-expression and attitudinising over form and (yes) beauty,  has become such a sprawling mess, so 'damp' and shapeless, whereas verse demands some rigour, some tightness, some adherence to form, even some attention to attracting readers from outside the charmed (and charmless) circle of fellow practitioners. In fact, it might be useful to talk of the best contemporary poets (a dwindling band) as writers of verse rather than poetry. It could even come to be seen as a badge of honour... 

Tuesday, 4 February 2025

Déjà Vu Dru

 It's time for an anniversary, and today's is that of the pioneering English entomologist Dru Dury, born on this day in 1725. (A shame he wasn't a Doctor, then he'd have been Dr Dru Drury.) The illustration above, by the great Moses Harris, is from Drury's 'Opus entomologicus splendissimus'Illustrations of Natural History.
 Drury, a successful and wealthy goldsmith (and father of 17) with a royal warrant and a shop on the Strand, spent much of his spare time amassing and describing a huge collection of insects from around the world, including more than 2,000 species of Lepidoptera alone - this at a time when there were thought to be no more than 20,000 insect species in total. It is said that when the Danish entomologist Fabricius visited England, he inspected Drury's collection with 'as much glee as a lover of wine does the sight of his wine cellar well stocked with full casks and bottles'.
  As well as paying others to collect specimens for him from around the world - issuing precise instructions and paying a standard rate - Drury enjoyed collecting for himself, mostly in Middlesex and the still rural suburbs of north London, but with excursions into Surrey, Sussex, Kent and Epping Forest. His diaries speak of 'Swallowtails very plentiful' around Warnham in Surrey, and 'Black Veind white Butterfly [now extinct in Britain] plentiful and fine' in Epping Forest. A reminder of the wealth of butterfly life in England in the 18th century - a wealth that lasted well into the 20th century.
  Drury died at the ripe old age of 79 and was buried at St Martin's-in-the-Fields. When his mighty insect collection was sold a couple of years later, it fetched barely £600 - less than a sixth of what he spent on it. Ah well, it was never about the money...

If the above seems familiar, that's because I first posted it on January 4th nine years ago. I'm posting it again because butterflies have been much on my mind lately: not only am I missing them, as always at this time of year, and yearning for their vernal reappearance, but also I've just been giving my long-pupating butterfly book a final read-through before it goes to the printers. It looks as if it's still on schedule for publication in May, and I'll have more about it nearer the date...

Sunday, 2 February 2025

A Trick of Sunlight

 Delighted to get my hands on another volume of Dick Davis's poems – A Trick of Sunlight: Poems 2001-2005 – at a reasonable price (and from an English bookseller). The first poem in the collection is this:

"The heart has its abandoned mines . . ."
Old workings masked by scrub and scree.
Sometimes, far, far beneath the surface
An empty chamber will collapse;
But to the passer-by the change
Is almost imperceptible:
A leaf's slight tremor, or a stone
Dislodged into the vacant shaft.

With its tight, concise form and vivid actualisation of metaphor, it reminded me of a poet I'd never before thought of in connection with Dick Davis – Kay Ryan, as in poems like 'Chinese Foot Chart' –

Every part of us
alerts another part.
Press a spot in
the tender arch and
feel the scalp
twitch. We are no
match for ourselves
but our own release.
Each touch
uncatches some
remote lock. Look,
boats of mercy
embark from
our heart at the
oddest knock.

Davis's collection takes its title from this rather beautiful little poem, on a theme (its possibility, its impossibility, its illusory nature, its fleetingness, its reality) that is close to the poet's heart – 

Happiness

The weirdest entry in our lexicon,
The word whose referent we never know –
A river valley from a Book of Hours
Somewhere in southern Europe long ago.

Or once, to someone walking by the Loire,
A trick of sunlight on a summer's day
Revealed the Virgin in rococo clouds:
The peasants in the fields knelt down to pray.

Friday, 31 January 2025

New Town, Old Roots

 What's this then? It's All Saints, the parish church of Milton Keynes – the original Milton Keynes, that is, the charming little village that gave the new town its name and is now surrounded by its sprawling namesake. I was there yesterday, in winter sunshine, and had a good look at the church, inside and out; it's very fine, in my favourite style, the one we call Decorated (and the French call 'Flamboyant' – flaming), characterised by flowing lines and curves, especially in the window tracery. The nearby old rectory is also rather wonderful, and, as with many areas of the MK footprint, you would hardly know you were anywhere near a modern new town (though the sound of traffic is hard to escape). In the churchyard of All Saints are buried the remains of a hundred or so late Saxons whose bones were excavated in a field nearby. Farther on in the walk we passed through – on a metalled path, incongruously – a fine deserted medieval village. This 'new town' has old and deep roots. It was a sunny, blue sky day, for a wonder, and I saw, as well as drifts of Snowdrops, my first Winter Aconites of the year.
   Of Worthing I have little to report except that it was extremely windy, and at one point I had the humbling experience of being very nearly blown off my feet by a gust that must have been at least gale force. I think I have probably exhausted the subject of Oscar Wilde in Worthing (see here and here), and, looking for further literary connections, I discovered that two of our greatest nature writers – W.H. Hudson and Richard Jefferies – are both buried in the same Worthing cemetery. I must look into this...

Monday, 27 January 2025

Memorial Day

 Just to say that Radio 3's breakfast programme today, live from Auschwitz, was a simply wonderful broadcast, one of the finest, most beautiful and moving I have ever heard. Presenter Petroc Trelawny is shaping up to be a truly great radio broadcaster – and the music, and the stories told... Sometimes it was almost unbearable, but it was a magnificent, memorable piece of radio. If you missed it, it should be possible to find it on BBC Sounds. 

Sunday, 26 January 2025

The Throwout Bearing

 A dreary, sodden day of wind and rain, with more of the same threatened, so here is something to bring a little cheer. It's an anecdote from Joseph Epstein's Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life. Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life, which is still my bedtime reading, slow reader that I am. This made me laugh out loud...
[At this point Epstein, a man who has had many jobs in his life, is in Arkansas working for the North Little Rock Urban Renewal Agency, where all his colleagues are Southerners.]
'One among them, a genial man named Harold Russell, was currently building his own house on weekends. When I happened to mention to him that I needed to replace something called a "throwout bearing" in my used Corvair – the car, by the way, featured for its flaws in Ralph Nader's book Unsafe at Any Speed – Harold told me that replacing it presented no real problem. "All you have to do is lift the engine and screw in the bearing underneath." Lift the engine? He told me that here all I needed was to get a #197 pulley, park the car between two strong trees, and with the aid of a the pulley lift up the engine and screw in the bearing. Simple enough, no? Had I attempted it, I could imagine the next day's headline in the Arkansas Gazette: "Jewish man found dead under Corvair Engine, Car Parked Between Two Trees in North Little Rock."
  For a few years afterward, whenever I brought one of my cars in for repair, I would casually mention that I had just installed a throwout bearing in it, suggesting that I had done it myself and thus was not a man for any mechanic to attempt to cheat. Much later I learned that only cars with manual transmissions, or clutches, had throwout bearings. Gotcha, Schmuckowitz! those various mechanics must have thought.'


  Which led me to read up about throwout bearings on the internet. Such is life. 
  And from tomorrow I'll most likely be out of action on the blog front for a few days, on family business in rain-lashed Worthing, then walking in rain-lashed Milton Keynes, or rather touring the historic villages that make up that much maligned New Town. 


Saturday, 25 January 2025

'And that will be England gone'

 In 1972 the UK government participated in the UN Stockholm Conference on the Environment, submitting a number of papers, one of them titled How Do You Want to Live? Deciding that they wanted to commission a preface to set the tone of the report, they commissioned that notorious cock-eyed optimist Philip Larkin, and – surprise, surprise – they were not entirely satisfied with the result, publishing a bowdlerised version, under the plain title 'Prologue'. Larkin happily pocketed the fee, then reworked the poem, restored the cuts, changed the title to 'Going, Going' (completed on this day in 1972) and published it in High Windows. It's not one of his best poems, but, like so many of Larkin's, it ends beautifully, and contains some resonant phrases: 'I thought it would last my time', 'Things are tougher than we are', 'It seems, just now, to be happening so very fast', 'And that will be England gone', 'Most things are never meant', 'I just think it will happen, soon'...

Going, Going

I thought it would last my time –

The sense that, beyond the town,

There would always be fields and farms,

Where the village louts could climb

Such trees as were not cut down;

I knew there’d be false alarms

 

In the papers about old streets

And split level shopping, but some

Have always been left so far;

And when the old part retreats

As the bleak high-risers come

We can always escape in the car.

 

Things are tougher than we are, just

As earth will always respond

However we mess it about;

Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:

The tides will be clean beyond.

– But what do I feel now? Doubt?

 

Or age, simply? The crowd

Is young in the M1 cafe;

Their kids are screaming for more –

More houses, more parking allowed,

More caravan sites, more pay.

On the Business Page, a score

 

Of spectacled grins approve

Some takeover bid that entails

Five per cent profit (and ten

Per cent more in the estuaries): move

Your works to the unspoilt dales

(Grey area grants)! And when

 

You try to get near the sea

In summer ...

It seems, just now,

To be happening so very fast;

Despite all the land left free

For the first time I feel somehow

That it isn’t going to last,

 

That before I snuff it, the whole

Boiling will be bricked in

Except for the tourist parts –

First slum of Europe: a role

It won’t be hard to win,

With a cast of crooks and tarts.

 

And that will be England gone,

The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,

The guildhalls, the carved choirs.

There’ll be books; it will linger on

In galleries; but all that remains

For us will be concrete and tyres.

 

Most things are never meant.

This won’t be, most likely; but greeds

And garbage are too thick-strewn

To be swept up now, or invent

Excuses that make them all needs.

I just think it will happen, soon.


Reading the poem today, it seems prophetic only in the sense that Larkin's England was indeed, as he sensed, going, going – but in all manner of ways, with changes that went far beyond the urban spread that is Larkin's preoccupation. If he had cast his net more widely, the results might well have been even more pessimistic, so perhaps it's just as well he didn't. His reflex pessimism was often, I think, quite shallow, half jocular, and frequently wrong. I recall that when he had his mother's ashes interred in St Michael's churchyard in Lichfield in 1977, the Rector told him that it was the last burial in the old churchyard, which also contained several earlier Larkin family graves. The churchyard would now, Larkin averred in a letter to Barbara Pym, be 'handed over to the Council to be landscaped into a vandals' playground or some such nonsense. I expect I shan't see all the old Larkin graves again ... as they will all be levelled and the stones taken away.' He was quite wrong, of course: the old churchyard of St Michael's is now a combination of well maintained historic burial ground and well managed nature reserve, and the old Larkin graves are still there, quite easily found. The one that eludes me, oddly, is that of Larkin's parents, which, having found it once (and photographed it), I have never been able to find again. 

Friday, 24 January 2025

Spot the Author

 This, believe it or not, is the great Southern writer Eudora Welty in her younger days, hamming it up for the camera (she was an excellent photographer herself). The picture is used on the cover of a volume of early writings, cartoons and odds and ends called Early Escapades, edited by her long-time friend Patti Carr Black. 'An evening with her,' Black recalls, 'was like being at vaudeville. She was great at one-liners and quick responses. She had such clarity and wit, you were always taken aback.' 

Thursday, 23 January 2025

Manet Day: Two Artists Paint Each Other

It has become a tradition on this blog to mark the birthday (in 1832) of one of my favourite painters, the great Edouard Manet. This year's picture is one I have actually seen, on the canvas, since the last birthday. It hangs on the walls of the Barber Institute in Birmingham, which I visited last autumn. A portrait of Manet's friend and fellow artist Carolus-Duran, it is clearly unfinished (especially the landscape background), but it has a huge presence, in part because of its size: it is over 6ft tall and almost as wide. The nonchalant swagger of Carolus-Duran's pose is caught perfectly, and his dress suggests he has just ridden over from his nearby country home. Manet at the time was staying on the estate of a wealthy patron near Paris, where, he wrote, 'there is too much entertainment here to work seriously', but he and Carolus-Duran agreed to paint each other's portraits (Carolus-Duran was famous for his portraits of members of Parisian high society). In return for Manet's grand, if sketchy, swagger portrait, Carolus-Duran painted this affectionate, informal portrait of his friend, adopting a loose, easy style perfectly in keeping with its subject. It is perhaps the most attractive portrait we have of the often rather forbidding-looking Manet.



Tuesday, 21 January 2025

Sam and Dave

 Just realised that I missed a Johnsonian anniversary yesterday – blame it on Blue Monday. 
  It was on January 20th in 1779 that David Garrick, the most famous actor of his generation, died, predeceasing his friend, fellow Lichfieldian and one-time teacher, Samuel Johnson. 'I am disappointed,' wrote Johnson, 'by that stroke of death which has eclipsed the gaiety of nations, and impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.' Johnson, the older man, had known Garrick since the latter's Lichfield boyhood (both were alumni of Lichfield grammar school), and the young David Garrick had been one of the handful of pupils who attended the school that Johnson and his wife established at Edial, a few miles outside the city. When this doomed venture collapsed, Johnson and Garrick, sharing a horse, set out for London in search of fame and fortune – which both of them eventually found. They remained firm friends, though Garrick was not above giving wickedly accurate impersonations of the Great Cham, and Johnson took a somewhat condescending attitude to his young friend's theatrical career, stellar though it was. He would, however, never allow anyone else to say anything at all disobliging about Garrick. 
  David Garrick's funeral procession was one of the longest seen in London, stretching all the way from the Strand to Westminster Abbey, where he was interred in Poets' Corner. Fittingly, he also has a memorial in Lichfield Cathedral, in the form of a bust, with Johnson's epitaph ('I am disappointed...') inscribed below. 
  In one of my favourite Johnson quotations, the great man tells Garrick that he shan't be joining him behind the scenes at the theatre any more: 'I'll come no more behind your scenes, David; for the silk stockings and white bosoms of your actresses excite my amorous propensities.' 

Monday, 20 January 2025

Blue on Blue

 Today, being the third Monday of January, is Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year, according to a press release – sorry, 'scientific formula' worked out by 'experts'. Today the weather in England is certainly doing its best to live up to the billing – cold, grey and wet, yet another sunless day. What to do but pile blue on blue? Here is the song 'Blue Melody' from the album Blue Afternoon by the late great Tim Buckley. What a voice...


Saturday, 18 January 2025

'The old notes still are new'

 Born on this day in 1840 was (Henry) Austin Dobson, a poet and essayist who is barely remembered today, but left some interesting work behind. Strongly influenced by French literature, Dobson delighted, like many writers of the late nineteenth century, in mastering a wide range of poetical forms – this was the period when the British Museum was, in Edmund Gosse's phrase, 'a hive of rondeliers'. Triolets, villanelles, sestinas, even the pantoum  – all were within Dobson's range. But he could write in a plainer, more discursive style too – as here, where he ponders the future of poetry in 'our prose-bound community' and sets out his poetic credo, a credo that seems to me pretty sound: that 'song must sing', that form matters, and that, in the right hands, 'the old notes still are new' and 'the Truth that pleased will please again'. The closing line refers to the scene in the Iliad when Hector comes to take his farewell of his wife Andromache and his son Astyanax, and leaves for what Andromache is convinced will be his certain death...

On the Future of Poetry    

Bards of the Future! you that come
  With striding march, and roll of drum,
  What will your newest challenge be
  To our prose-bound community?
  What magic will you find to stir
  The limp and languid listener?
  Will it be daring and dramatic?
  Will it be frankly democratic?
  Will Pegasus return again
In guise of modern aeroplane,
Descending from a cloudless blue
To drop on us a bomb or two?
I know not. Far be it from me
To darken dark futurity;
Still less to render more perplexed
The last vagary, or the next.
Leave Pindus Hill to those who list,
Iconoclast or anarchist —
So be it. "They that break shall pay."
I stand upon the ancient way.
I hold it for a certain thing,
That, blank or rhyming, song must sing;
And more, that what is good for verse,
Need not, by dint of rhyme, grow worse.
I hold that they who deal in rhyme
Must take the standpoint of the time —
But not to catch the public ear,
As mountebank or pulpiteer;
That the old notes are still the new,
If the musician's touch be true —
Nor can the hand that knows its trade
Achieve the trite and ready-made;
That your first theme is Human Life,
Its hopes and fears, its love and strife —
A theme no custom can efface,
Common, but never commonplace;
For this, beyond all doubt, is plain:
The Truth that pleased will please again,
And move men as in bygone years
When Hector's wife smiled through her tears.

Thursday, 16 January 2025

'The curiosity of future ages'

'When the Funerall pyre was out, and the last valediction over, men took a lasting adieu of their interred Friends, little expecting the curiosity of future ages should comment upon their ashes, and, having no old experience of the duration of their Reliques, held no opinion of such after-considerations. 
  But who knows the fate of his bones, or how often he is to be buried? Who hath the Oracle of his ashes, or whither they are to be scattered?'
  So begins the Epistle Dedicatory of Sir Thomas Browne's masterpiece, Urn Burial (Hydriotaphia). This passage came to mind the other night when I was half-watching Digging for Britain, an archaeological programme on BBC2. Much of it was dedicated to the excavation of a medieval burial ground containing large numbers of remarkably well preserved skeletons from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Genetic scientists were getting to work on these, extracting DNA (of which the best sources, surprisingly, are the tiny ossicles of the inner ear) to find out what they can about these long dead people and what killed them. Particularly affecting were a pair of young male skeletons, brothers who had died together, of the Black Death, and been buried together. As the scientists probed and tested, I found it uncomfortable viewing. These people certainly did not die expecting 'the curiosity of future ages' to be picking over their bones a few centuries later, and they surely had some sense – as most people still do even now – that their remains amounted to more than just a pile of old bones, and deserved a degree of reverence, of recognition of their individual worth and identity, the soul that once animated those bones. How old do human remains have to be before they forfeit any such claim on posterity? A hundred years? Probably too little. Two hundred? Maybe. Certainly by the time we get back to the medieval period, it seems that human remains, skeletons and bones anyway, have pretty much lost their humanity and become mere objects of forensic curiosity. But is it just a matter of age? Things are different, it seems, with remains that are more recognisably individual, having been mummified or preserved in peat bogs or mountain ice. I recall that on my last visit to Derby Museum and Art Gallery, their two Egyptian mummies, of individuals called Pypyu and Pa-sheri, are displayed with a good deal of interpretive signage and reminders that these were human beings and visitors might find it disturbing to see them on display. Pypyu and Pa-sheri have been better served by posterity than all those much more recent medieval dead.   

Monday, 13 January 2025

Epstein's Luck

 Top of my bedside reading pile just now is a gift from my daughter – the great essayist Joseph Epstein's new memoir, Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life. Especially If You've Had a Lucky Life. As I am another who feels he's had a lucky life, in all manner of ways (and is hesitant about saying so, for fear of tempting fate), I am naturally drawn to a book with such a title, and so far  I'm enjoying it hugely, as I always enjoy Epstein's writings. He is a brilliant but unshowy writer, a master of his craft, with a wonderfully light touch and a terrific sense of humour – and of proportion, which is much the same thing. 
  Epstein counts himself lucky on many counts – 'in the time in which I was born, in the parents to whom I was born, in my education, and much more' – and I could say much the same, though there were times when I wouldn't have entirely assented to the second of those. In terms of time, I'd count myself perhaps luckier than Epstein in having been born in 1949 rather than his 1937. This meant I was the right age to enjoy the golden age of popular music that unfolded, or rather exploded, from the mid-Sixties to the mid-Seventies. However, it also meant that I was perfectly placed to succumb resistlessly to the various excesses and self-destructive idiocies of what we think of as the Sixties (which mostly happened in the Seventies).
  I certainly see, as Epstein does, the years I have lived through as marked by radical change: 'from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status ... from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel versus print, and much more'. One of the small, but significant, changes Epstein notes is that 'our parents also had a certain decorum missing from parents of later generations. I do not recall seeing my mother not wearing a dress (or at home what was called a 'housecoat') or without makeup. Until his retirement at 75, my father had no leisure clothes. Today, on the streets of my own middle-class neighbourhood, I see older men and women go about in flip-flops, cargo shorts and tank tops, getups my parents wouldn't have worn to take out the garbage.' I'm sure Epstein would not be seen dead in such apparel. Nor, come to that, would I. Some of us, even children of the Sixties, still have a residual belief in the bella figura

Sunday, 12 January 2025

Rosalba

 Born on this day in 1673 was the great Venetian pastel portraitist Rosalba Carriera, one of the most talented and successful women artists of her time. Her best works demonstrate a mastery of subtle tonalities and exquisitely rendered textures, drawn in free, spontaneous strokes, using pastels made to her own innovative formulations. Her informal, very direct self-portraits are among her best work. The one above, showing her holding a portrait of her beloved sister and companion Giovanna, hangs in the portrait gallery of the Uffizi. Giovanna's death in 1738 sent Rosalba into a deep depression, but she continued working until her eyesight failed in the mid-1740s. One of her last self-portraits [below], which she gave to the British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith, is in the Royal Collection, where I remember seeing it a few years back in an exhibition at the Queen's Gallery. Sadly, Carriera, after her glittering career, died blind and alone in Venice in 1757, having outlived all her family. 

Thursday, 9 January 2025

'I sought a theme...'

 This wretched flu, like an ageing artiste reluctant to leave the stage, keeps coming back for yet one more encore. This is very wearing, and as a result my spirits are low and mental activity sluggish. Not a good time to be reading late Yeats, you might think, but this morning, as I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' inevitably swam into what's left of my mind.
Most poets either peter out in the natural course of things, or carry on doing their thing for as long as they can get away with it, or descend into prolixity (Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, even Geoffrey Hill) – but a few find new poetical life in old age: Hardy, Wallace Stevens, and supremely Yeats, in whom the decrepitude, absurdity and indignity of old age sparked a great resurgence of his poetical powers, blowing away any last traces of the Celtic twilight. Here is 'The Circus Animals' Desertion' in all its raging glory – 

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last being but a broken man
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his fairy bride.

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
`The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it,
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.