Tag: Lockdown

The Ship by J C Squire

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I don’t know much about J C Squire (1884–1958). He was one of those early twentieth century all-round “men of letters”, a type that does not really exist today. As well as a poet, he was the editor of the London Mercury, a literary magazine of the 1920s.  

I’m not sure of the date of this poem. It was certainly written before 1928, when the anthology I found it in was published. Like so many poems of that era, it can be taken as a metaphor for the first world war.

I have chosen to share it, though, because I find that the return of the ghost-like ship has taken on a different meaning as we finally come to the end of this strange phase of life that we have all been through together. The ragged crew have returned to harbour, with no material gain from their difficult voyage, just glad to have endured and made it back alive.   

The Ship by J C Squire 

There was no song nor shout of joy
Nor beam of moon or sun,
When she came back from the voyage
Long ago begun;
But twilight on the waters
Was quiet and gray,
And she glided steady, steady and pensive,
Over the open bay.

Her sails were brown and ragged,
And her crew hollow-eyed,
But their silent lips spoke content
And their shoulders pride;
Though she had no captives on her deck,
And in her hold
There were no heaps of corn or timber
Or silks or gold.

Snow by Walter de la Mare

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We finally got some snow yesterday. It was a welcome change from the lockdown to feel the crisp, crunchy snow under one’s feet.

Today, it’s a bright sunny day, almost with the promise of early spring in the air, and the snow has turned to treacherous ice on the pavement, or slush where it has melted. Will we see any more this winter?

There are several famous poems about snow or the winter more generally. I decided to go with this one, because I think it is less well-known than those by Thomas Hardy or Robert Bridges.

I’m not sure exactly when it was written; it is included in De la Mare’s 1944 Collected Rhymes and Verses. This is the collection intended for children. With De la Mare, though, the line between works for adults and works for children is always blurry. As he wrote in his introduction: “Somewhere the two streams divide — and may re-intermingle. Both, whatever the quality of the water, and of what it holds in solution, sprang from the same source”.  


Snow by Walter de la Mare

No breath of wind,
No gleam of sun —
Still the white snow
Whirls softly down —
Twig and bough
And blade and thorn
All in an icy
Quiet, forlorn.
Whispering, rustling,
Through the air,
On sill and stone,
Roof — everywhere,
It heaps its powdery
Crystal flakes,
Of every tree
A mountain makes;
Till pale and faint
At shut of day,
Stoops from the West
One wintry ray,
And, feathered in fire,
Where ghosts the moon,
A robin shrills
His lonely tune.

At Castle Boterel by Thomas Hardy

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Something funny has happened to my sense of time during the various lockdowns. Memories of things I thought I had forgotten keep popping up into my mind and they seem as vivid as the present. Time has collapsed, and the barrier between the past and present has broken down, it would appear.

Perhaps it’s not just the strange circumstances of 2020 that has caused this. It might also have something to do with my experience of major surgery in hospital during the summer of that year.   

It feels appropriate, then, to look at a poem where Thomas Hardy reflects on his past and the passage of time.

I heard this poem in an edition of the BBC Radio 3 programme Words and Music, entitled “The Haunted Landscape”. The readings are not identified, so I did not know who had written it. The effect was quite interesting; something about the poem made me think it was comparatively recent. The word “wagonette” called to mind an American station wagon.

I was quite surprised that the poem turned out to be by Hardy. That demonstrates quite neatly, I think, why his poetry has lasted. He gets to grips with fundamental things that do not change. Although a Victorian, his sensibility feels curiously modern.

As in some of his other poems, in this one he contrasts the history of the landscape with the personal history of the speaker of the poem.  

The date at the bottom tells us that it is one of his “poems of 1912–13”, a series of elegiac poems where Hardy remembers his first wife and looks back on their life together.  

At Castle Boterel by Thomas Hardy

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
   And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
   And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
         Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
   In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
   To ease the sturdy pony’s load
         When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
   Matters not much, nor to what it led, ―
Something that life will not be balked of
   Without rude reason till hope is dead,
         And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
   A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill’s story? To one mind never,
   Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
         By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road’s steep border,
   And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth’s long order;
   But what they record in colour and cast
         Is—that we two passed.

And to me, though Time’s unflinching rigour,
   In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
   Remains on the slope, as when that night
         Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
   I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
   And I shall traverse old love’s domain
         Never again.

March 1913

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

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I have written before about the way in which familiar novels, stories and poems have taken on new meanings with the unforeseen events that we have all been living through this year.

This poem is a new discovery for me. How did I not find it until now? It is regarded as one of the best about the impact of the blitz on London in 1941, yet lines leap out from it as if they were written recently about what has been going on these last few months.

It is a long poem in five sections, too long to quote in full here, so I have just included the first two sections. There are lines that seem to me startlingly appropriate for the situation we find ourselves in now. I think that Binyon, who was not a young man at this point, poured all his dismay at what he saw happening around him in London into this poem.

The second part describes the sadness of the closed and empty theatres during the blitz. It is sobering to read this during a week when it seems that cinemas may have closed forever.

A poem for this season of autumn then, and truly a poem whose time has come again.

The Burning of the Leaves by Laurence Binyon

I
Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

II
Never was anything so deserted
As this dim theatre
Now, when in passive greyness the remote
Morning is here,
Daunting the wintry glitter of the pale,
Half-lit chandelier.

Never was anything disenchanted
As this silence!
Gleams of soiled gilding on curved balconies
Empty; immense
Dead crimson curtain, tasselled with its old
And staled pretence.

Nothing is heard but a shuffling and knocking
Of mop and mat,
Where dustily two charwomen exchange
Leisurely chat.
Stretching and settling to voluptuous sleep
Curls a cat.

The voices are gone, the voices
That laughed and cried.
It is as if the whole marvel of the world
Had blankly died,
Exposed, inert as a drowned body left
By the ebb of the tide.

Beautiful as water, beautiful as fire,
The voices came,
Made the eyes to open and the ears to hear,
The hand to lie intent and motionless,
The heart to flame,
The radiance of reality was there,
Splendour and shame.

Slowly an arm dropped, and an empire fell.
We saw, we knew.
A head was lifted, and a soul was freed.
Abysses opened into heaven and hell.
We heard, we drew
Into our thrilled veins courage of the truth
That searched us through.

But the voices are all departed,
The vision dull.
Daylight disconsolately enters
Only to annul.
The vast space is hollow and empty
As a skull.



What should I read during the lockdown?

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I’ve seen a lot of articles lately, both in print and online, as to what we might read during the lockdown.  A lot of self-improving advice of the “now is the time to tackle Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time” sort. But then I have also seen quite a lot of people saying that, when it all started, they found their concentration affected, particularly when it came to fiction. I had that problem myself. It was as if the events going on in the real world made it impossible to live in an imaginary one.

What could possibly be the right sort of thing to read in these strange times that seem to create such an odd state of mind, I kept asking myself. Should I go for humour and escapism or no-holds-barred realism? In the end I decided I was over-thinking the whole question and stopped agonising about it. I would carry on with my unread pile, as usual. When that was done, I would pick an old favourite off the shelf and just see how I got on.

The unread pile was down to two. First was John Gardner’s James Bond continuation novel, Death is Forever, hugely enjoyable, expertly crafted escapism. Next up was Henry Williamson, and It Was The Nightingale, escapism of a different sort, into the rural North Devon of the 1920s.

Now it was time to look at the shelf. After several false starts, I settled on the Gorse Trilogy by Patrick Hamilton. I have written about these novels in more detail elsewhere. The combination of mordant humour and insights into the darker aspects of human nature seemed to hit exactly the right spot.

Around this time I heard a very interesting podcast on the subject of reading, with American academic Alan Jacobs. His basic idea is “reading by Whim” (note the upper case “W”), which comes from the American poet Randall Jarrell.

Reading should not be about laboriously working one’s way through a list of “great books”. It is not a box-ticking exercise. If one talks about “getting through” a book, one is in fact talking about wanting to have read the book, possibly to impress other people.

An alternative method of finding good books is to read the books that the authors you like had read themselves. This will eventually lead you back to the “great books”, but in a way that means more to you.

He also addressed the vexed question of whether or not you should finish a book if you are not getting much from it. It’s ok not to finish. It probably means that you are simply not the right reader for that book. (That made me feel much better about my inability to finish The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, despite having tried three times!) I think you could summarise this approach to reading as “one thing leads to another”.

I realised that in my own reading, one thing had been leading to another without my noticing it. The 1920s setting of Henry Williamson had perhaps reminded me of Patrick Hamilton’s rather different view of that same era.

I found myself drawn to a volume of Joseph Conrad’s short stories. Perhaps he popped back into my mind because his death is mentioned by Henry Williamson. Whatever it was that brought me to them, I have to say there is something about the mood and feel of these stories by Conrad that perfectly suits my current state of mind.

The life and death struggle with the ship that is first leaking, then burning in Youth; the decline into madness and death of the two lazy and incompetent traders in An Outpost of Progress; the plight of the central European emigrant, washed up on the beach in Kent to become an alien in a strange land in Amy Foster.

I have read Conrad all my life, but it’s as if I never truly understood what he was trying to tell us until now.

I think I have answered my own question. Conrad’s tales of the extremes of human experience in an indifferent world seem just right for where we find ourselves at the moment.