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• Message 1.听

  Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Saturday, 6th June 2009

  The Writer's Group this month is taking Gardens as the theme for our own poems or prose. We have had two wonderful poems about gardens by published poets included. It would be interesting to discuss and share these favourites [or hates if any!] so here is a corner for anyone wants to draw up a comfortable chair. And it doesn't have to be about gardens.
  
  One programme I have enjoyed was about the Orkney poet and writer George MacKay Brown. The poem discussed was based on his father's life as an island postman 'Hamnavoe'.
  "My father passed with his penny letters
  Through closes opening and shutting like legends"
  
  A modern poet, Douglas Dunn, takes traditional elegance but speaks in his poems of the events of his life, sometimes in Scotland and sometimes elsewhere. A verse from his poem 'Apples'
  
  "I eat an apple, skin, core and pips
  And sleep at night the way a yokel sleeps
  With thyme and borage in my palliasse,
  Lavender pillows in the house of grass"
  
  [a word to the wise: if a poem is within copyright date, add the link rather than the whole poem.]
  
  

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• Message 2

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  Posted by One (U8211650) on Saturday, 6th June 2009

  Just posting a flyer for 主播大秀2 at 9.45 this evening. 1/2 hour programme about the greatest poet, in English, of the tewentieth century - TS Eliot. Includes Eliot reading from The Waste Land. Hope to be back to talk about it later (or tomorrow).
  
  Don't miss it

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• Message 3

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  Posted by Slightly-Foxed_a cat needs rehoming in Droitwich (U9332727) on Saturday, 6th June 2009

  Yes Reggie, I've already bagged my seat in the front row of the balcony, with the popcorn, only England V Kazakhstan can stop me now.
  
  With regard to the other posts about Marvell, he has always fascinated me because he is such an enigmatic figure. There are considerable problems around the dating of some of the poems, though it's generally acknowledged that The Garden is part of a cycle of work he did while tutoring the family of Sir Thomas Fairfax at Nun Appleton House near York, immediately after the Civil War.
  
  It's a bit of a "how many children had Lady MacBeth" interpretation, and personally I have always tended much more towards the I A Richards approach of not needing to know anything about the poet or his circumstances in order to appreciate the work, but it's very tempting to see the Arcadian cadences of The Garden as being a deliberate retreat from a landscape ravaged by the chaos of the Civil War.
  
  There's also the religious, Neo-Platonist idea of getting back to God by means of getting back to nature, which you also find in Vaughan and to a certain extent George Herbert. And echoes of Donne's The Exstasie in the description of the soul leaving the body, though in Donne's case it is a manifestation of profane love, rather than sacred.
  
  I will come back to this but I am mindful that Beardy Branston's now you see it now you don't broadband connection may at any minute cast me into exterior darkness, and I don't want to lose what I have typed so far

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  Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Saturday, 6th June 2009

  Hang on there, SF, see you later!

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• Message 5

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  Posted by Slightly-Foxed_a cat needs rehoming in Droitwich (U9332727) on Saturday, 6th June 2009

  Phew, it worked. Now I only have to overcome the depredations of the Flea.
  
  Anyway, as I was saying, Eliot was of course very interested in, and influenced by, the poetry of the 17th century - not just the poetry of course also the sermons of people such as Lancelot Andrewes.
  
  And I think there are echoes of the same sentiments of Marvell's withdrawal into a real or imagined Arcadia in the opening Rose Garden sequence of Burnt Norton, though Eliot adds the additional strand of the speculation on the nature of "what might have been" and the notion that "what might have been remains a perpetual abstraction" - a theory which is actually now being increasingly borne out scientifically, by the discoveries of things such as M-theory and string theory
  
  "ridiculous the sad waste of time, stretching before and after"
  
  Anyway, coming back to Marvell, it would be a shame if all he was remembered for was To His Coy Mistress, fine poem though it undoubtedly is within its genre. My own personal favourites are the cycle of "Mower" poems - The Mower to the Glow Worms and the other two poems that go with them, whose titles escape me for the moment.
  
  Going to post this now before the Norns that overlook the Tree of the World cut the broadband thread without warning

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  Posted by Josey (U1242413) on Saturday, 6th June 2009

  Thanks for the heads-up on the Eliot, Reggie, didn't know that was on.

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• Message 7

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  Posted by Slightly-Foxed_a cat needs rehoming in Droitwich (U9332727) on Saturday, 6th June 2009

  I have been working on a book today as it happens trying to get it ready to go to press in time to take some copies with us to Arran this summer and I talk about Eliot, and the idea of writers as heroes, in that. This is the extract - apologies for the length, as the Bishop said to the Actress.
  
  
  What use are heroes? (or heroines?) They give us someone to follow, I suppose, a template against which to measure ourselves. I have certainly followed Eliot, sometimes with more success than others. Of the four places that form the title of the Four Quartets, I went to East Coker, the village in Somerset where his ashes are buried, coincidentally the first time I ever went to Glastonbury, and I had also been to Little Gidding, briefly, on a trip up the A1 about twenty years ago. The Dry Salvages are a group of rocks off the coast of Cape Cod, so I am unlikely to be visiting them in the near future, or indeed ever, which left only one unvisited location mentioned in Eliot鈥檚 poem, Burnt Norton.
  
  I had a go at finding Burnt Norton House back when I was at college, and at the time, although I lived in Oxfordshire, I didn鈥檛 drive, so getting about was difficult. Plus, the house is not open to the public, it is actually the home of Viscount and Viscountess Sandon and their family. So I thought I would have another go, that Wednesday, the week after Coniston, which found me leaving a meeting in Cheltenham, earlier than I had anticipated, on a fine September teatime. I had done no research, but I had a vague idea that the house, with its rose garden, which was visited by Eliot and Emily Hale in 1936 and which inspired Eliot to write the poem, was off one of the roads leading out of Chipping Norton. Burnt Norton, Chipping Norton, it seemed an easy connection to make.
  
  90 minutes later, having orbited Chipping Norton several times, been down every road at least twice, and stopped to ask a little old lady of sufficient vintage that she might have actually been there when TS Eliot visited, but who turned out never to have heard of it, I gave up, and turned my wheels towards the M1. It was only when I looked it up on the internet that night, that I discovered I should have gone to Chipping Camden, and not Chipping Norton. Next time, remind me to listen to the Chipping Forecast.
  
  The episode had put Eliot back into my thoughts though, and I dug out some of my college books and spent a few hours of google-time catching up on some of the more recent developments in Eliot-land. The following weekend, on the premise of going somewhere different, I persuaded Debbie, Tiggy and Freddie to accompany me on a re-visit to Little Gidding, the Huntingdonshire village that forms the basis for another of Eliot鈥檚 meditative poems in Four Quartets. Debbie was the one that took most persuading. All I had to do to persuade Tig and Freddie was to hold open the car door and utter the W-word, the one that rhymes with 鈥減orkies鈥� and they scampered up on to the back seat.
  
  We arrived at Little Gidding after a two-hour drive down the A1, never my favourite road, in the middle of a rainstorm of biblical proportions. As we beetled down the little single-track roads across huge bare fields stretching to the horizon on either side, there was nothing to save us from the full torrential force of it, and the windscreen wipers, even on 鈥渄ouble-click鈥� were struggling to clear the water from the windscreen. It was, quite literally, like driving through a car wash. So we didn鈥檛 have the same experience Eliot describes, of 鈥渕idwinter spring鈥� when the brief sun flames on frost and ice. Nor did we go by the road behind the piggery, that he mentions. The road these days shepherds you straight into the car park next to Ferrers House. I suppose once a few large coach trips had got stuck behind the piggery, they decided to do something about it.
  
  The rain was still bucketing down, and we sat there and listened to it drumming on the roof, with Deb鈥檚 refusal (understandable) to take the doggies out in it developing into a full-blown 鈥渄omestic鈥� of the sort that runs through the general unwisdom on my part of setting off on this particular journey to this particular destination on this particular day, and ends up with a more generalised litany of all my faults, with worked examples, and how these have manifested themselves in the ten years Debbie and I have been together. So it was quite a lengthy row, as rows go, even though I didn鈥檛 actively participate, in the hope of getting it over quickly. Unfortunately, once Debbie starts on this routine, she has to go through it right to the end, a bit like an opera singer doing her scales. Perhaps she practices it when I am not there, who knows?
  
  So it was only me, who eventually ventured across the sodden car park and over the grass towards the tiny little church. Immediately outside the front door is the grey, weathered, table-top tomb of Nicholas Ferrar himself, who founded the religious community at Little Gidding, just after the Civil War, and I let my hand rest momentarily on it, wondering if Eliot had done the same, 70 years ago.
  
  Eliot wrote of this church, - 鈥測ou are here to kneel where prayer has been valid鈥� and, to be honest, once you get inside it, there isn鈥檛 really a lot of room to do anything else. If the Church of England ever institutes cat-swinging as a religious observence, or even incense 鈥搒winging, come to that, Little Gidding will have serious problems. The church was, of course, nothing more originally than the house chapel of Ferrars House, and the original community, the church and the house were all bound up in the same cluster of activity. There was an attempt to resurrect a similar atmosphere, in the form of The Community of Christ The Sower, in the 1970鈥檚, which lasted for about twenty years before descending into acrimony and allegations of the misuse of charity funds that were eventually legally resolved, with all parties going their separate ways in 1998. I had read that Little Gidding was once more attempting to re-make itself in its own image, with a new committee and a group of active 鈥渇riends鈥�, but perhaps it鈥檚 too early to tell.
  
  The church was not much wider than a railway carriage. This absurd thought kept running through my mind, as I stood there imagining the vicar shouting 鈥淎ll aboard! Bound for glory!鈥� and blowing a whistle or waving a flag. The obligatory quotations from Eliot, together with one from George Herbert, who also has connections with the locality, are on the wall, in the form of embroidered wall-hangings. The choir stalls are polished wood, there is no lighting, and the smell is the familiar one of 鈥淐hurch of England essence of old hymnbooks and musty damp silence鈥� that so many Anglican churches exude. Perhaps they advertise tins of the stuff in The Church Times. The plain window at the altar end was the only source of light (Eliot would have seen the garish and overbearing crucifixion stained-glass window installed by William Hopkinson, Lord of the Manor, in 1853, and only recently removed to Peterborough High School in 1990.)
  
  The rain pattering and the tracery of the green branches waving in the wind outside through the plain Venetian glass almost gave the impression of being in a tent. Feeling rather like someone who didn鈥檛 know what to do next, I felt in my pocket for my recently-acquired rosary, which came from Ampleforth Abbey, and in a gesture of ecuminism, said a few prayers from it, standing facing the altar.
  
  I found myself wondering what I had come for. Was I following TS Eliot, my hero? Bob Dylan said 鈥淒on鈥檛 follow leaders/Watch the parking meters鈥� - but are leaders the same as heroes? Bob followed Woody, after all. Blair is a leader, but he鈥檚 a long way off being a hero, despite his spellbinding oratory in last ever Labour conference speech, a speech which was all the more remarkable for what got left out.
  
  There was a book, where people were encouraged to write their prayer intentions, and they promised that the vicar would read them out. Quite courageous, in view of what some people had written before me. I kept mine short, asking them to pray for an end to cruel and useless animal experiments (on the offchance that Huntingdon Life Science might be listening) to pray for the homeless, with the onset of winter, and to pray for religious peace and tolerance on all sides. I also filled in the visitors鈥� book, putting that I had come to kneel where prayer had been valid, which was not original, but was at least true.
  
  Standing there in St John鈥檚 Chapel, I found myself trying to tune in to what it was saying. It certainly felt much different to the slightly malevolent feeling of transmitted annoyance that I felt at Glastonbury Abbey (perhaps the monks, angered at the success beyond all their expectations of their enterprise in medieval tourism, sending a collective groan from the next world to be just left alone?) and also different again to the huge belt of (? What?) that I got from standing in front of the frame containing the supposed fragment of the true cross in Holy Cross Abbey in Ireland: that was radiating the sunshine and clamour of the holy land in a great wave of wordless emotion - this moment was something different, something quieter, altogether English, less Mediterranean. The still small voice of calm?
  
  Quietly, I closed the door on Little Gidding and made my way back to the car, and made my peace with Debbie and Tig and Freddie by detouring to have a look at Rutland Water on the way back, recce-ing it for kayak possibilities and dog-dunking in the water.
  听

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• Message 8

  , in reply to message 5.

  Posted by One (U8211650) on Saturday, 6th June 2009

  And not just the seventeenth century poets and preachers:
  
  Webster was much possessed by death
  And saw the skull beneath the skin;
  And breastless creatures under ground
  Leaned backward with a lipless grin.
  
  
  It's not half an hour as I posted above but a full one hour thirty minutes. Can't wait.

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• Message 9

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  Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Sunday, 7th June 2009

  Did anyone watch the Eliot programme?

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• Message 10

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  Posted by th_ange (U2258550) on Sunday, 7th June 2009

  Gutted I missed it. Was it good?

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• Message 11

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  Posted by One (U8211650) on Sunday, 7th June 2009

  I watched it and found it slightly disappointing. It was a well made programme, well filmed, with some good archive stuff and a lot of perceptive comments on his work.
  
  On the other hand it there was much too much about his second marriage and the latter part of his life. His career as a poet ended effectively in 1942 when the Four Quartets were published so from the point of view of his work the last quarter century of his life is of little interest. At times I thought the programme was almost an advertising plug for Faber and Faber.
  
  I'd like to have heard more on the origins of and influences on his poetry.
  
  I had forgotten how rubbish he is at reading his own poetry. The should have had more of Alec Guinness. I heard him reading the Four Quartets on R3 once. Terrific.
  
  Before I saw the programme I was planning to post something pretentious here on Eliot's influence on Dylan, particularly Desolation Row. But someone on the programme beat me to it. So I'll just point out that the second verse of Visions of Johanna ('In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman's bluff with the key chain') sounds as though it could have been lifted from The Waste Land.

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• Message 12

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  Posted by Slightly-Foxed_a cat needs rehoming in Droitwich (U9332727) on Sunday, 7th June 2009

  I haven't seen it all yet. I saw the first 15 minutes, then we videod the next half hour, which I have still to see (England v Kazakhstan, don't ask) then the last 45 minutes of it I watched live.
  
  I detected the iron hand of the second Mrs Eliot in several places.
  
  Vacant lots - doesn't Eliot have a poem about the worlds revolving like old women gathering fuel in vacant lots (The Boston Evening - Transcript?) Dreadful- shame on me I spent three years studying the man and I can't remember!

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  Posted by One (U8211650) on Sunday, 7th June 2009

  Of course, sf! 'The worlds revolve like ancient women gathering fuel on vacant lots...' (Preludes). How could I have forgotten that.
  
  I only studied Eliot for A level but he was what really turned me on to poetry. Opened the book and read the first three lines of Prufrock and I was hooked. Barely a week has passed since then when I haven't read him, or listened to Dylan for that matter.
  
  Nice to know that your twin cultural icons have so much in common.

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  Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Sunday, 7th June 2009

  Slightly Foxed, I felt she had decided what and who should be in the programme and her word was law. Presumably she would have been executor of his estate?

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