Denis Russell

To Ber 25/12/77

Bernadette [surname] MCMLXXUIII [1978]

[Finsbury Park Address]

‘Apology For Understatement’

‘Forgive me that I pitch your praise too low.

Such reticence my reverence demands,

For silence falls with laying on of hands.

Forgive me that my words come thin and slow.

This could not be a time for eloquence,

For silence falls with healing of the sense.

We only utter what we lightly know.

And it is rather that my love knows me.

It is that your perfection set me free.

Verse is dressed up that has nowhere to go.

You took away my glibness with my fear.

Forgive me that I stand in silence here.

It is not words could pay you what I owe.’

John Wain.

1925

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

T.S. Eliot

‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night’

‘Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

‘Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

‘Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas

“Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows;

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

‘That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.”

A.E. Houseman

“I look into my glass,

And view my wasting skin,

And say, ‘Would God it came to pass

My heart had shrunk as thin!

‘For then, I, undistrest

By hearts grown cold to me,

Could lonely wait my endless rest wait my endless rest

With equanimity. equanimity.

‘But Time, to make me grieve,

Part steals, lets part abide;

And shakes this fragile frame at eve frame at eve

With throbbings of noontide”

Thomas Hardy

Louis MacNeice

(1907 – 1963)

“Dublin”

“Grey brick upon brick,

Declamatory bronze

On sombre pedestals –

O’Connell, Grattan, Moore –

And the brewery tugs and the swans

On the balustraded stream

And the bare bones of a fanlight

Over a hungry door

And the air soft on the cheek

And porter running from the taps

With a head of yellow cream

And Nelson on his pillar

Watching his world collapse.

“This never was my town,

I was not born or bred

Nor schooled here and she will not

Have me alive or dead

But yet she holds my mind

With her seedy elegance,

With her gentle veils of rain

And all her ghosts that walk

And all that hide behind

Her Georgian facades –

The catcalls and the pain,

The glamour of her squalor,

The bravado of her talk.

“The lights jig in the river

With a concertina movement

And the sun comes up in the morning

Like barley-sugar on the water

And the mist on the Wicklow hills

Is close, as close

As the peasantry were to the landlord,

As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish,

As the killer is close one moment

To the man he kills,

Or as the moment itself

Is close to the next moment.

“She is not an Irish town

And she is not English,

Historic with guns and vermin

And the cold renown

Of a fragment of Church latin,

Of an oratorical phrase.

But oh the days are soft,

Soft enough to forget

The lesson better learnt,

The bullet on the wet

Streets, the crooked deal,

The steel behind the laugh,

The Four Courts burnt.

“Fort of the Dane,

Garrison of the Saxon,

Augustan capital

Of a Gaelic nation,

Appropriating all

The alien brought,

You give me time for thought

And by a juggler’s trick

You poise the toppling hour –

O greyness run to flower,

Grey stone, grey water,

And brick upon grey brick.”

“Christmas: 1924”

“ “Peace upon earth!” was said. We sing it,

And pay a million priests to bring it.

After two thousand years of mass

We’ve got as far as poison-gas.”

Thomas Hardy

Sonnett CXLVIII [sic: is actually Sonnett CXLVII]

“My love is as a fever, longing still

For that which longer nurseth the disease,

Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please.

My reason, the physician to my love,

Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,

Hath left me, and I desperate now approve

Desire is death, which physic did except.

Past cure I am, now reason is past care,

And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,

At random from the truth vainly expressed:

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,

Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.”

William Shakespeare

I have forgot to wake present

The half absent thought.

You’re real, but once removed.

Not much use to call

Revearsing [?] down an empty hall/wall

To empty bed where deserts yawn..

The sigh is ever long + worn

But forget where the pain has torn the spine

I am so cold, I have grown so cold.

Your special soul is all

I need to make a half life whole.

I’m here but still unmoved.

There’s no denying,

The music’s dying

With a dying fall.

I turn my face against the wall

You won’t hear me if I call.

The whining questions are so old

And I am oh so cold, so very cold.

BMW

IV/V/MCMLXXX [As far as I can tell, Bernadette is BMW and this poem is her own work. WG.]

Sunflowers

Caught in the rush of heavy fragrant blossom

I brought a bowl of sunflowers to your room.

Their wicked open faces threw green along the walls

And hotly kissed my cheek with golden pollen balls

They caught the sun, and made it dance along my arm,

And I felt a fullness of seedy sunflower charm

I understood their madness.

But no, you couldn’t bear sunflowers you said,

And brushed the beads of pollen

From the pillow of your bed.

VI/V/MCMLXXX

BMW

Dear Dad,

I was stone mad about you as a girl

Tagging along whenever I could

Rambling over building sites

Watching you work and make the lads laugh

Easy in yourself, yourself among others

I felt proud when you owned me as yours

Waiting for you to buy your round

Dragging you home to Mum

Sharing your pork chop

Tasty in three hours of its own gravy

I hope you knew how much I love you

Nagging you to sing Carrickfergus

Or sail that ship again, lovely Eileen

Making me cry again, you laughing at me

Tell us again about your long days

Your blue eyes were my star signs

Searching for my future in them

Fighting to get out of your leg locks

Happiest when you were around me

I never could break free

Never wanted to Dad, live on in me.

14/3/03

[NB. As far as I can tell “Sunflowers” and “Dear Dad” are Bernadette’s own work. WG]

Dad’s poem. Thomas Hood

I remember, I remember,

The house where I was born,

The little window where the sun

Came peeping in at morn;

He never came a wink too soon,

Nor brought too long a day,

But now, I often wish the night

Had borne my breath away!

I remember, I remember,

The roses, red and white,

The vi’lets, and the lily-cups,

Those flowers made of light!

The lilacs where the robin built,

And where my brother set

The laburnum on his birthday,—

The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember,

Where I was used to swing,

And thought the air must rush as fresh

To swallows on the wing;

My spirit flew in feathers then,

That is so heavy now,

And summer pools could hardly cool

The fever on my brow!

I remember, I remember,

The fir trees dark and high;

I used to think their slender tops

Were close against the sky:

It was a childish ignorance,

But now ’tis little joy

To know I’m farther off from heav’n

Than when I was a boy.

(Dad’s poem)

The Signs of Rain  Edward Jenner

1 The hollow winds begin to blow,

2 The clouds look black, the glass is low,

3 The soot falls down, the spaniels sleep,

4 The spiders from their cobwebs peep:

5 Last night the sun went pale to bed,

6 The moon in halos hid her head;

7 The boding shepherd heaves a sigh,

8 For, see, a rainbow spans the sky:

9 The walls are damp, the ditches smell,

10 Closed is the pink-eyed pimpernel.

11 Hark how the chairs and tables crack!

12 Old Betty’s joints are on the rack;

13 Loud quack the ducks, the peacocks cry,

14 The distant hills are seeming nigh.

15 How restless are the snorting swine;

16 The busy flies disturb the kine;

17 Low o’er the grass the swallow wings,

18 The cricket too, how sharp he sings;

19 Puss on the hearth, with velvet paws,

20 Sits wiping o’er her whiskered jaws.

21 Through the clear stream the fishes rise,

22 And nimbly catch the incautious flies.

23 The glow-worms, numerous and bright,

24 Illumed the dewy dell last night.

25 At dusk the squalid toad was seen,

26 Hopping and crawling o’er the green;

27 The whirling wind the dust obeys,

28 And in the rapid eddy plays;

29 The frog has changed his yellow vest,

30 And in a russet coat is dressed.

[overleaf

31 Though June, the air is cold and still,

32 The mellow blackbird’s voice is shrill.]

33 My dog, so altered in his taste,

34 Quits mutton-bones on grass to feast;

35 And see yon rooks, how odd their flight,

36 They imitate the gliding kite,

37 And seem precipitate to fall,

38 As if they felt the piercing ball.

39 ‘Twill surely rain, I see with sorrow,

40 Our jaunt must be put off to-morrow.

[NB. For some reason the lines of the poem in the book have been written down in the wrong order, but have been numbered (by BMW?) in the correct order. For clarity here, I have transcribed the poem above in the correct order. WG.]

31 Though June, the air is cold and still,

32 The mellow blackbird’s voice is shrill.

Uncle Paddy

After a solitary life

Touching no one

His breath grew so short

We had to lift him

Onto the commode

“Ah, this is nice for you!”

Paddy, it’s nothing, I said

“Ah, I’m kicking out!”

You’re too young for that talk

“Sure all our people go early!

Is there anything after death?

I don’t think so, no!”

This from a man who had

Marked every holy day

On the farmer’s calendar

With a cross and kept

Granny’s Sacred Heart light

Burning always

Finally, the callow doctor came

“Paddy, if you don’t drink

You may die!” Later

at the hospital, after

Burly orderlies wrestled

Him into clean pyjamas,

He stared with the intent

Blue eyes glowed

[overleaf]

Working up the strength

To lift the glass

[NB. Again, as far as I am able to tell, this is a BMW original. WG]

Working up the strength

To lift the glass

Fire + Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Robert Frost

Mending Wall

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 out-door 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.’

Robert Frost

We my darling, for our sins

Suffer in each other’s woe

Read in [?] eyes and hands

How we broke divine commands

And served the Devil.

Who is passionate enough

When the punishment begins?

O my love, O my love,

In the night of fire and snow

Save me from evil.

WH Auden

From XII Songs [Is it? I can’t find this poem anywhere. WG.]

Death Of A Son

(who died in a mental hospital aged one)

“Something has ceased to come along with me.

Something like a person: something very like one.

And there was no nobility in it

Or anything like that.

‘Something there was like a one year

Old house, dumb as stone. While the near buildings

Sang like birds and laughed

Understanding the pact

‘They were to have with silence. But he

Neither sang nor laughed. He did not bless silence

Like bread, with words.

He did not forsake silence.

‘But rather, like a house in mourning

Kept the eye turned in to watch the silence while

The other houses like birds

Sang around him.

‘And the breathing silence neither

Moved nor was still.

‘I have seen stones: I have seen brick

But this house was made up of neither bricks nor stone

But a house of flesh and blood

With flesh of stone

‘And bricks for blood. A house

Of stones and blood in breathing silence with the other

Birds singing crazy on its chimneys.

But this was silence,

‘This was something else, this was

Hearing and speaking though he was a house drawn

Into silence, this was

Something religious in his silence,

‘Something shining in his quiet,

This was different this was altogether something else:

Though he never spoke, this

Was something to do with death.

‘And then slowly the eye stopped looking

Inward. The silence rose and became still.

The look turned to the outer place and stopped,

With the birds still shrilling around him.

And as if he could speak

‘He turned over on his side with his one year

Red as a wound

He turned over as if he could be sorry for this

And out of his eyes two great tears rolled like stones,

and he died.”

John Silkin (1930)