It was the Rainbow gave thee birth

Political change for the good of civilisation, skinny Prosecco, home-baked bread, cookies and parmesan biscuits - also good for civilisation!

Watching woods fill up with snow

In the past fortnight there has been “too much weather” – bright blue skies, dull dark skies, gales, rain bursts, floods, mud pools, mud slides and snow. “It must be beautiful this time of year – all that snow!” So, I here offer some images of the woods and meadow near me, blanketed in snow. I have posted before about Robert Frost’s famous poem about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. This year, during Lockdown 3.0, there has been plenty of time to stop and stare (copyright W H Davies) at the lighting effects on the snowy crystals on the bare branches

Photos by Emily

I also love a quiet place

On one walk a miracle occurred: across a pond, above some reeds, a blue streak caught our eyes. We stood still, stared and waited. And there it was – one of my life ambitions fulfilled – a kingfisher in the wild. And, yes, it fished. And flapped. And bobbed its head. And perched. And stood. And streaked down into the pond again and back again to settle on its vantage point. It kingfished. And haunted. The last verb is inspired by Supertramp poet, W H Davies, who I’ve mentioned and quoted before. His poem below about a kingfisher is one I learned in primary school and later used as a teacher with Year 7 classes because it efficiently illustrated the use of archaic vocabulary and syntax, repetition, half rhyme, alliteration, assonance, simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia – and even more sophisticated poetic techniques – all in one lovely-sounding 18-line package.

The Kingfisher

by W H Davies

It was the Rainbow gave thee birth,

And left thee all her lovely hues;

And, as her mother’s name was Tears,

So runs it in my blood to choose

For haunts the lonely pools, and keep

In company with trees that weep.

Go you and, with such glorious hues,

Live with proud peacocks in green parks;

On lawns as smooth as shining glass,

Let every feather show its marks;

Get thee on boughs and clap thy wings

Before the windows of proud kings.

Nay, lovely Bird, thou art not vain;

Thou hast no proud, ambitious mind;

I also love a quiet place

That’s green, away from all mankind;

A lonely pool, and let a tree

Sigh with her bosom over me.

What I do is me: for that I came

On the day I saw the kingfisher I also thought of one of my obsessions – one of the most brilliant poets in the English language: a poet who led a fascinating life and wrought poems like a Christ-loving-pagan blacksmith hammering golden swords whilst wrestling with fiery demons in the tattered and billowing cloud of God’s abundant, undulating duvet…. Yes, he’s a hyperbolic wordsmith, that Gerard Manley Hopkins – what a guy! Any road up, he wrote a sonnet about all things expressing their own selves, being themselves, expressing themselves (What I do is me: for that I came) and although the second half of the sonnet gets profoundly religious, he starts with three ordinary sounds: a bell, a string on a musical instrument and a stone dropped down a well; as well as two startling sights: the flaming glimpse of a dragonfly and the fiery lick of a kingfisher.

Kingfisher, Dragonfly, Stone, String, Bell

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same….

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same. Snow falls. Kingfishers fish. Poets distil. What I do is me: for that I came…. We are, as people say, human beings not human doings…. So stopping, standing and staring at snow on the bare branches of trees, or watching a kingfisher haunting a lonely pool, or pausing, breathing and resting – that kind of time-wasting is not time wasted. The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

Lockdown VE Day (Blog 300)

Two roads diverged
Some who know me might be surprised to find I wanted to mark VE Day in some way. Those who know me well know that I’m a keen supporter of the British Royal Legion (and all its works) and have posted about Remembrance Day in past blogs, for example:
Falling Leaves Like Snowflakes
In Flanders field the poppies blow
There but not there
Teenage me spent some time with the Territorial Army Cadets and I almost joined the navy as a radar operator before I was deflected onto an alternative course and the world of English and Drama. Oh, the decisions we make and how The Road Not Taken can give us reasons to reflect: WHAT IF...!?

Badby celebrations, Alex's bunting, Joyce's afternoon tea, Sally's scones, Tony's Victoria Sponge

Remembrance and Victory Over Evil
This year’s VE Day was the 75th anniversary and much of the celebrations were constrained by the country’s attempts to restrict the spread of Covid-19. But there were still plenty of scones to be baked, bunting (makeshift and otherwise) to be raised, and monarchs to behold the swelling scene. Numpties stupidly referred to the day as Victory Over Europe rather than what it was: Victory In Europe or, as some Germans wisely call it, Victory Over Evil. How will we “celebrate” in August on the 75th anniversary of Japan signing an unconditional surrender to the Allies following the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? All in good time…. What was clear about VE Day in 1945 is that the mood of the country led to the Labour government that founded the NHS: populations across the world longed for unity and international cooperation; it was a time that promised the end of divisions, inequality and differences. It was a time of hope. It was going to be a brave new world….

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep"

Frosty afternoon at Bolton Abbey
Walking to the Strid or to Barden Bridge on the estate of Bolton Abbey ranks as amongst the best pleasures in life. Even on cold days when icy trails of white decorate the trees and your feet feel numb. A recent walk reminded me of the enigmatic Robert Frost 1923 poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.

The darkest evening of the year
Like all the best poetry, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening raises a series of questions in the mind and heart: Are the woods real or metaphorical? Who is “he”? Where is the village? Why doesn’t the voice think “he will not see me stopping here”? Why does the voice of the poem “stop…. Between the woods and frozen lake”? What do the harness bells signify?  Why does the horse think instinctively a mistake has been made? Why is "downy" flake descriptive but the wind mysteriously "easy"? What promises have to be kept? Is sleep the sleep following tiredness or the sleep of death? Is the “darkest evening of the year” literally the winter solstice (21st December) or an imaginary“darkest” evening personal to the narrator?

Walling in and walling out

Walls: walling in or walling out or falling down or being pulled down?

Walls, walls, walls

Walls protect, yes, but walls are also forbidding barriers, and they can form a prison, and they can be a symbol of loneliness or isolation. Blank walls staring out have been used over centuries to depict intractability as well as inertia. Shirley Valentine talked to the kitchen wall in her domestic solitude, Pink Floyd sang about Another Brick In The Wall, Achilles chased Hector three times around the walls of Troy, Joshua marched around the walls of Jericho and then brought them a-tumbling down with shouts and rams’ horns. As Robert Frost wrote:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.

Pink Floyd, Jericho walls, walls of Troy, Shirley Valentine

Gentles, perchance you wonder at this show….

Quince: This man with lime and rough-cast doth present
Wall, that vile Wall which did these lovers sunder;
And through Wall’s chink, poor souls, they are content
To whisper….

Tom Snout plays Wall in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

Sinister cranny

Wall: In this same interlude it doth befall
That I, one Snout by name, present a Wall;
And such a Wall, as I would have you think,
That had in it a crannied hole or chink,
Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe,
Did whisper often, very secretly.
This loam, this rough-cast and this stone doth show
That I am that same Wall; the truth is so:
And this the cranny is, right and sinister,
Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper….

Cursed be thy stones

Pyramus: O grim-look'd night! O night with hue so black!
O night, which ever art when day is not!
O night, O night! alack, alack, alack,
I fear my Thisbe’s promise is forgot!
And thou, O Wall, O sweet, O lovely Wall,
That stand'st between her father's ground and mine!
Thou Wall, O Wall, O sweet and lovely Wall,
Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eye!
Thanks, courteous Wall: Jove shield thee well for this!
But what see I? No Thisbe do I see.
O wicked Wall, through whom I see no bliss!
Cursed be thy stones for thus deceiving me….

Human Rights March in Leeds in response to President Trump's policies - proud of Sally, Harriet, Maggie and Christine and all the rest who attended

This vile Wall

Thisbe: O Wall, full often hast thou heard my moans,
For parting my fair Pyramus and me!
My cherry lips have often kiss'd thy stones*,
Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee…. 
Pyramus: O kiss me through the hole of this vile Wall!
Thisbe: I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all.

*Stones, of course, are Elizabethan slang for balls/knackers/testicles and – hole – well, the precise hole being kissed depends on which chink the actor playing Snout offers up…. 

Many American landscapes are awe-inspiring; countless aspects of American culture are having a positive influence on the world; and I know and love people in America:

• Inspiring world figures like Mohammed Ali, Neil Armstrong, Walt Disney, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Rosa Parks;
• Novelists like Harper Lee, Kerry Madden, John Steinbeck, Anne Tyler;
• Playwrights like Edward Albee, Lillian Hellman, Tony Kushner, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Sam Shepherd, Tennessee Williams;
• Poets like Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Bishop, ee cummings, Emily Dickinson, TS Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound; 

– these are, dare I say it, tremendous people, without thinking too hard about who to include, not to even begin mentioning singers and actors…. Tom Hanks, Katherine Hepburn, Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, for heavens’ sake, to name but four…! Is this a country that needs a Wall? A country whose current manifestation and wealth has been created from immigration? When birds fly around the globe, do they see borders?

Mending Wall

Genius satirical banners in the UK courtesy of The Poke

Robert Frost’s celebrated (American) poem Mending Wall was first published in 1914, right on the brink of the First World War. I haven’t seen it printed yet in the context of President Trump’s policies so here it is. “Good fences make good neighbours” is what the neighbour in the poem repeats (twice) but the poem has a tension that pulls away from that cliché and more potent are other lines that are repeated: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”

Thanks to The Poke

Brief personal thoughts on Mending Wall

In Spring, two neigbours walk the wall between their properties to make repairs – is there a reason for this wall to be built at all? There are no cows, just apple trees and pine trees. Should you summon “spells” to counteract “elves,” a whimsical idea that suggests wall-building is an ancient, outdated ritual, not suited to modern thinking. Maybe the act of building a wall is a chance to talk about boundaries, to talk about customs on either side of the wall, to negotiate why the wall is there. Could a wall be built as a sign of goodwill, mutual trust and cooperation? Or is the wall an act of aggression, a hostile barrier to community? If you place a boulder (a stone, a “loaf,” a ball) into the wall, one day it will fall down. Walls fall down. Sometimes they are pulled down. Has any wall ever “stood the test of time?” How jubilant the world was when the Berlin wall was brought a-tumbling down! We build walls, even when they are not needed. Some people break walls, even when they shouldn’t. The world carries on building walls regardless of whether or not they are effective. Like all great poems, all these ideas are wrapped up in the distilled metaphor of Frost’s Mending Wall.

Mending Wall by Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Like an old-stone savage armed/He moves in darkness

Good fences make good neighbours! Do they? Do they REALLY, though? Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.