This is one of my favourite contemporary poems.

I met David Wright many years ago, in the Lake District, at a conference of the Society of Medical Writers (he’s a doctor).
The Society had held a competition, and David was a prize winner – I think not for this particular poem, though it’s so good that it would have stood out in any competition.

I’ve read ‘Returning’ many times, and it never fails to give me a sense of serenity. David knows what he’s talking about, and he finds a perfect (and unexpected) way to express it. The poem has a free form, yet it also has a natural rhythm which perfectly suits the breath and heartbeat mentioned in the poem.

It seemed to me that the poem might please many readers, and also comfort many, if – as seems natural – they sometimes worry about dying. So here it is, with many thanks to David for kindly allowing me to post it. I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do.

RETURNING

Yes, I have seen death – many times:
on curtained wards and in attic
bedrooms, to the roll of trolleys
across linoed floors and to the soft
tap of branches on thin windows.

And every time, the question:
why so different, this pause
between one beat and the next that
is not a pause? After all, the heart
hangs a thousand times each day.

But now that, for you, death
is near, no longer waiting for a
distant date, but prowls instead
the diary in your jacket pocket,
you ask a different question.

I can reassure you. There is no
pain, no distress, no hungriness
for breath. Yes, I have seen these
things of course, many times,
but they are birth, not death.

Birth is the struggle, birth that flings
us into harshness, light and noise;
death is an easing, a sigh, a setting free,
it is the waves’ foam streaming through
the sand returning to the sea.

– David J. Wright

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to join an event at Girton College, Cambridge commemorating the poet and critic Veronica Forrest-Thomson. I decided to speak on three important poets who studied at Girton (where I was lucky enough to have a visiting Fellowship in 2018-19). The talks were short – each speaker had about 20 minutes. Here’s what I said.

‘THE WRONG MUSIC’? – POST-GIRTON POETICS IN KATHLEEN RAINE, OLIVE FRASER, AND VERONICA FORREST-THOMSON

Veronica Forrest-Thomson (1947-75)

My title, taken from ‘The Unwanted Child’, by Olive Fraser, is not meant as a negative criticism but to suggest that all three poets wrote against expectations, not least at Girton when they studied here. The image that comes to mind is that of a spark thrown into a box of fireworks. The fireworks blazed, crackled and exploded in many different directions with no single trajectory. Sometimes one can identify a unifying trend, or even a ‘school’. From Girton, it came to seem to me, the tradition was to react, sometimes quite violently, and then to find one’s own way to a uniquely individual poetry. You could hardly find three poets less like one another than the three I have chosen, and yet they have much in common, in the things against which they reacted, developing their own post-Girton poetics. What does unify them is, in a phrase from Veronica Forrest-Thomson, the quest for ‘alternative imaginary orders’.     

Kathleen Raine (1908-2003)

            Kathleen Raine came to Girton in 1925, reading Natural Sciences. She heard Virginias Woolf give the talk that became A Room of One’s Own at the college Literary Society. The lecture amazed her: ‘a room and a small unearned income’ were, she recalled, ‘luxuries unimaginable.’ She had been accustomed to write her poems ‘on the marble-topped table of a Lyons’ or an ABC tea-shop’, and though she now had a room of her own at Girton, she ‘did not expect it to last’. But she soon discovered that her own poetic enthusiasms (Keats and Shelley, Yeats, de la Mare and Hardy) were ‘not the thing at all’. Instead she was expected to enter a world dominated by ‘Wittgenstein’s and Russell’s new logical positivism’,  and ‘the materialist science of the Cavendish Laboratory’. She faced the necessity of ‘discard[ing] my own intuitions in order to learn a more “intelligent” way of reading poetry’. She got to know William Empson, who remained a friend, and she read his poems. But, reading Emspon’s poem, ‘Camping Out’, she found it ‘strange that what appeared to be a love-poem should open with the line:

And now she cleans her teeth into the lake…

‘I was,’ she says, ‘naïve enough to be repelled by this image.’ But she recognised that ‘Empson’s tone of despair contained by intellectual stoicism expressed a more than personal predicament.’

She soon got to know Empson, who made an impression, she says, of ‘contained mental energy, as of a flame whose outline remains constant while it substance is undergoing continual transformation at a temperature at which only intellectual salamanders could hope to live.’ With him she visited Diaghilev’s ballet productions, and the British Museum, where ‘we walked together among the oriental gods’. They remained friends for many years after Cambridge, and she cherished his many eccentricities: turning up for a Lake District walk wearing two left shoes, or marking his place in a book with a kipper bone. But they never agreed about poetry and eventually Kathleen Raine found her inspiration in poetry directly opposed to everything Empson approved. It was, from his point of view, altogether ‘the wrong music’.

It was not until the Second World War, in Cumberland, after mystical experience and with the encouragement of two Christians, poet Norman Nicholson and patron Helen Sutherland, that she discovered her poetic voice:

 NIGHT IN MARTINDALE

Not in the rustle of water, the air’s noise,

The roar of storm, the ominous birds, the cries –

The angel here speaks with a human voice.

Stone into man must grow, the human word

Carved by our whispers in the passing air

Is the authentic utterance of cloud,

The speech of flowing water, blowing wind,

Of silver moon and stunted juniper.

Words say, waters flow,

Rocks weather, ferns wither, winds blow, times go,

I write the sun’s Love, and the stars’ No.

Olive Fraser (1909-1977)

           Olive Fraser entered Girton in 1933, some four years after Kathleen Raine left. But I can make a link because in 1988 eleven years after Olive Fraser’s death, when Fraser was entirely unknown, Kathleen Raine published five of her poems in her journal Temenos.

Olive Fraser (1901-77), had a life seared by tragedy. Abandoned by her divorced mother in infancy she lived through both world wars, suffering mental and physical ill-health, especially undiagnosed hypothyroidism. Much of her life was spent in mental hospitals, but her life was transformed for the last seven years when her complaint was finally diagnosed. Olive Fraser was at Girton from 1933 to 36 as a student of, I think, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic. She won numerous poetry prizes, including being the first woman to win the Chancellor’s Medal for poetry. She developed into a remarkably individual lyric poet, but her poems are hardly known: once she was hospitalised she had no means of publication; she said, ‘When I send a poem to a publisher with ‘Royal Mental Hospital’ at the top they just grin. They don’t even send the script back.’ It was she who described – not her poetry, but herself! –  as ‘The wrong music’ in a poem addressed to her mother – a poem called significantly ‘The Unwanted Child’: ‘I was the wrong music, / The wrong guest for you / When I came through the tundras / And through the dew.’ She wrote entirely independently of the intellectual currents Kathleen Raine describes.

Fraser’s poetry covers a huge range and much remains unpublished. I’m going to quote just two poems. The first, written during the Second World War, when she worked as a ‘Land Girl’, looks back wryly at Girton itself, playing off Thomas Gray’s ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’.

ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF GIRTON COLLEGE

Here the snow beats her flowers of fate

On my soul’s gate.

Here the redbreast weeps again

For the world of men.

Here the child cries, cries wild

Ever for the lost child.

Here the maiden lays her down

Her shroud her wedding gown.

Here does heavenly Plato snore,

A cypher, no more.

Here Herodotus goes by

At many knots, silently.

Here sits Dante in the dim

With Freud watching him.

Here does blessed Mozart seem

Alas, a sensual dream.

Here I could curse the hearts that shred

The great roses of the dead.

Here does holy innocence crave

A convent or a grave.

Here does Love lose his wings

Where women are female things.

Here is virginity thought to be

A state of the flesh only.

Here, my blood, muffle thy drum

Lest the hangman come.

Here, my muse, as we had died,

Sleep or be crucified.

Here’s not thy Parnassus bright

But Hecla’s icy light

O here do never, never come

Pure spring, perfect autumn.

Olive Fraser went on to write in many different voices and forms, ranging from Scots dialect to lyrics in a Renaissance-sounding voice and ballads which seem to come quite naturally:

When I am all forgotten

With eel and ouzel and bee,

And the dark wood has thy buried breast

And some dark rock has me,

O shall we both inhabit

Some other almonry

As merry as when we loved here

The spring, the green pine tree? [To a Pheasant]

She never follow the styles common in her lifetime. Her poems were not collected until 1989. She is still shamefully little known.

Our third poet, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, was Scottish like Olive Fraser, and like her came to Girton for postgraduate study, completing a Ph D in 1971. There is an obvious link to Kathleen Raine in that William Empson was central to her experience of criticism. It seems that like Raine, she had to find a means of accommodating to his view of poetry, and unlike Raine, who left and developed an opposed path thereafter, Forrest-Thomson engaged directly with Empson as a theorist. Empson is everywhere in Poetic Artifice. He is in fact mentioned by name sixty-three times, and Forrest-Thomson begins her book by taking on Empson’s famous analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, ‘They that have power to hurt and will do none’, in Some Versions of Pastoral.

Her object here seems to be to out-Empson Empson: to use an Empson-like method of close reading that goes beyond closeness to the microscopic and even the electron-microscopic levels, defeating Empson at his own game, so to speak, by intensifying his methods to the point of parody, creating a reductio ad absurdum of the Empsonian method. Of course structuralism and the influence of Wittgenstein are also important (Wittgenstein is mentioned only four times in the book), but its presiding genius, or antagonist perhaps, is Empson. Thus poems are taken apart or rewritten audaciously: the clearly untrue statement (she must have known it was untrue!) that ‘by convention the first and last words in a line are stressed’ enables her to trim Shakespeare’s first quatrain down to

They                None

That                 show

Who                stone

Unmoved        slow

Her view that poetry is differentiated from everyday language by its “non-meaningful features” (whereas she must have known like every poet that there are NO non-meaningful features in poetry) allows her to ‘rewrite [it] on the level of formal pattern alone’:

Ay Oh mallah an ouch turumto foone

Ah Ah honhol layllay mallala Oh

Oooch muvsing uhvsing ah ten shelves ossone

Untooved vold ond to terumdum go.

– surely a tribute to Empson’s solemn treatment in his Pastoral book of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Notice that ‘ouch’ here comes at the point where Shakespeare has ‘hurt’; And where did those ‘ten shelves’ come from? One suspects a personal reference. Are there also perhaps echoes of Malay (she spent her first seven years in what was then called Malaya, where her father worked)?

I leave further discussion to abler critical theorists than I. Instead I will simply read one poem which I think expresses beautifully a quintessential experience of Girton – that of looking out of a window – and watching the rain.

A FORTIORI

their fractured grace: the wind

disintegrates raindrops: the raindrops

dissolve, a metal grid, that falls.

If all meaning is diacritical, one

will see dualism in anything intelligible.

The eye is like Aprile, that falleth, a priori,

on the flower, the grass, the bird, the

fire-escape – its frame shifted by drops

that glance, with their bright eye-balls

fractured in the wind: the blank world

which its whiteness defends.

All dualisms are not equivalent

nor do they imply one another.

Whiteness defends the grass, the bird, the

raindrops, a light that falls refracts

our fractured grace: our glance: the wind.

A few days ago I decided to read the modern Greek poet Constantin Cavafy (1863-1933) again – the Collected Poems translated by Rae Dalven, and published by the Hogarth Press.

The experience was interesting in all sorts of ways, not all of them to do with the poetry. Like the fact that I got the volume as a present on my 21^st birthday – I’d forgotten that. And the fact that it contained a cutting from the TLS of a letter from my friend Michael Schmidt, complaining about Roy Fuller’s first lecture as Professor of Poetry.

That was ironic because later Michael published Fuller’s poems at Carcanet Press – by which time they’d both probably forgotten the episode.

Anyway let’s get on to Cavafy! I’ve loved him ever since the 1960s, because of his relaxed, personal tone, his ironies, his readiness to write about illicit sex in his more private poems (he was gay; I’m not), the modesty of his work. And the fact that his poems come over so well in English.

This last point baffles me. I love his poems, and I’m sure I’ve even been influenced by them, yet I don’t know a word of modern Greek. How is this possible? Somehow a tone and atmosphere come through. Auden said the same thing:

‘This perplexes and a little disturbs me. Like everybody else, I think, who writes poetry, I have always believed the essential difference between prose and poetry to be that prose can be translated and poetry cannot.

‘But if it is possible to be poetically influenced by work which one can read only in translation, this belief must be qualified.’

Auden decides that what ‘survives translation and excites’ in Cavafy is ‘Something I can only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a personal speech.’ To Auden’s comment, I would add: his imagery, and some of the situations he describes – very few poets actually describe intimate scenes (even as a novelist might do). Most sexual love in poetry is either idealised or given in extreme closeup – or from a great distance.

Cavafy conveys things like passing someone on the stairs and fancying them; or hanging about for hours in a café hoping a particular person will come in – but they don’t. Not many poets have really written about that.

And of course there are the great ironic historical poems most readers know, like ‘Expecting the Barbarians’, where all a city’s dignitaries are ‘assembled in the public square’, because ‘The barbarians are to arrive today.’ It’s a big deal, and a rather frightening one also. But by evening the barbarians haven’t shown up. And rumours have come that actually there aren’t any barbarians. The poem ends in a kind of disorientation: ‘And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? / Those people were a kind of solution.’

Cavafy is, as E.M. Forster said, ‘Standing at a slight angle to the universe.’ I like that. Another extraordinary writer who has a similar slant is Fernando Pessoa – maybe I’ll write about him one day.

Meanwhile, to end, here’s a poem of mine (from my book Playing With Fire, first published 2006) – a poem about the experience of Cavafy:

TAKING DOWN CAVAFY

Taking down Cavafy today, I recognised

how books from that era have a certain look –

from that era of my life, I mean:

from perhaps 1966 to ’77.

There’s something fermented about them, a kind of patina:

browned like autumn bracken by natural

process of acidity, damp

and foxing like rainspots on the paper,

they are also often thick

with a furry dust along the tops, dust which survived

the subsequent moves, a mulch compounded

of ash from the incense I ceaselessly burned,

from the housedust of tawdry, wornout bedsits

and student flats, and perhaps from the cigarettes

I haven’t touched now for nearly thirty years

as well as the bedroom (often there was no bedroom) motes

from the blankets, the moulting pillows,

the dying mattresses where I made love

with a series of girls as remote and unbelievable

now as Pompeian frescoes. And there’s something else

on the pages. What is there when I open the book

is not the poems I recall but other readings,

poems another person laid on the surface

of the words, expectations and ideas

incomprehensible now. They were spread there

often at 3 a.m. or on dull afternoons,

to a soundtrack of Mahler or the Grateful Dead,

when nothing (and more importantly, nobody)

was happening. They are made of unfulfilled

desires – which Cavafy says look like

the beautiful dead, shut in their mausoleum

‘with roses at the head and jasmine at the feet’.

But they are the desires of someone else

who has left the books to me. I’m glad to have them –

the books, that is – and read the poems now

trying to clear, yet guiltily tasting, the old readings that persist,

as I wiped – half reluctantly – the dust from the head of this book,

and savour the encroaching brown, the foxing,

the acidity nothing will take away.

Book Details

It may seem crazy, but for once I’m not going to write about poetry, the countryside, music or dance. I’m going to write about pillows. Trivial? Maybe. Give me a minute. (Try to stay awake…)

That’s because I want to share a weird little (but massive) discovery I made a few days ago. And the message of this post is: check your pillows – specifically, their height.

A few days ago, we had family coming to stay and we were distributing spare pillows in the various bedrooms. We have a mixture of feather-filled ones and foam ones. Personally I prefer to sleep on a feather pillow, but that’s not important. You may prefer otherwise.

We had one pillow left over, and instead of putting it away, Amanda said ‘Why not add it to the two you normally use and see if it’s comfortable?’

I did. It was a revelation. I realised in seconds that I was infinitely more comfortable with the somewhat higher three-pillow arrangement than I had been before with just two.

Settling down that night, I discovered very quickly that this was actually life-changing. I was hugely more comfortable, I slept better with fewer and shorter waking periods. My sleep since has been just infinitely better. It seems that for years – decades – I’ve been sleeping on pillows that were too low for complete comfort.

So the message is: try different numbers and heights of pillows. Add more, or take some away, experiment. See if your present arrangement is too low or too high, too hard or too soft. You’ll know immediately what feels good.

I recently read Matthew Walker’s excellent book Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams. A brilliant book and I highly recommend it. Full of good advice. But Dr Walker doesn’t say anything about pillows. He should. Anyway, now I have.

So that’s it. Call me Mr Pooter if you like. It may seem ridiculous. But I have the feeling that this is going to add years to my life. It’s certainly going to add hours of good quality sleep. Maybe it can help you too.

In Cumbria recently, I visited two monuments which – it occurred to me – oddly have something in common.  I’ll get back to that.

Heading for the Maryport Literature & Arts festival in March, I stopped off at Penrith and walked up Penrith Beacon, a fine precipitous wooded hill (‘fell’ in local parlance) overlooking the town. It’s a steep climb up through birch and pine, on sandy soil and passing several of the sandstone quarries from which the blocks for Penrith’s red houses and public buildings were once carved out.

At the top is the ‘Beacon’ itself, a pointed stone building which people will tell you is where beacon fires were lit to warn the locals of marauding armies approaching from Scotland. I’m sceptical about this: for a start the existing building doesn’t look old enough – it could just conceivably have been built in 1745 after the last Jacobite rebellion, when a Scottish army did indeed come through here heading for defeat at Preston. But it’s surely no older than that.

More importantly, there’s no way you could light a beacon-fire in it: it has a roof on the top and only small openings. A real beacon would have been some sort of raised platform with a metal fire-basket on top.  And sure enough, in front of the tower there is a raised patch with the remains of some stone paving. That’s surely where the real beacon was. Meanwhile we have this attractive little tower – a folly really – into which past visitors have carved their wonderfully neat graffiti, in the days when perfect handwriting and manual skills were compulsory, and carving your name on a public monument was perfectly acceptable.

Last summer, Amanda and I came up here with the poet Kieron Winn and his wife (also called Amanda). We explored the Beacon, and Kieron got me to read the passage about Penrith Beacon from Wordsworth’s Prelude, describing his memory of getting lost in the mist there as a child, finding the site of an old gibbet where ‘A murderer had been hanged in iron chains’ and then, ‘Reascending the bare common, saw / A naked pool that lay beneath the hills’ and met ‘A Girl that bore a pitcher on her head’ – and recalled the whole experience as unutterably strange: ‘I should need / Colours and words that are unknown to man / To paint the visionary dreariness /Which…Invested moorland waste and naked pool…’ Dreary for the young Wordsworth, to us the excursion on the Beacon was the delightful occupation of a summer’s day.

THEN last week I went up to Ulverston to see my old friend, the poet Neil Curry. We had a good lunch at the Rose and Crown (huge portions, good beer) and after we parted again I decided to walk up Hoad Hill, to Sir John Barrow’s Monument.

Barrow (1804-45), born near Ulverston, was a Secretary to the Admiralty, and responsible for numerous polar exploration expeditions, many of which came to grief with serious loss of life.  In those days it was all seen as part of the glorious adventure of Empire, and Barrow was commemorated with a massive memorial. The Admiralty contributed to the cost, on condition that the monument be built so that it could be used as a lighthouse if ever needed.

It never was, so here it is: a handsome lighthouse with no light or function. It struck me that a ‘beacon’ that could never be lit, and a ‘lighthouse’ with no lamp, made a good pair. So here they are together!