Spring (Again)

March 29th 2019

Cock robin he got a neat tippet at spring.....

And he whistled a ballad as loud as he could

And built him a nest of oak leaves by the wood

It's a beautiful day, despite the fact that this was supposed to be the day the UK severed its links with the EU.....  

In the untainted blue sky a fresh young kite sails loftily, spying for worms and other tiny morsels....

At the other end of the spectrum a blue tit rummages amongst the pussy willow,

And a coal tit hangs upside down while he seeks an early aphid or such.....

I take Amanda for a walk around the Ayots, deep Hertfordshire in Spring.  Everywhere life is busy renewing itself.  There is a sense of sap rising, of buds swelling.  I love the sheen that is detectable above the scribbled frame of a sturdy oak, that gleam of life just discernible at twig-tip....

Nearby a great willow almost sprays us with its joyful weeping....

Catkins fall, their freshness so good you want to eat them dusted with icing sugar and maybe just resting lightly on meringue and a drift of cream....

Buds burst, the young green leaves growing stronger by the minute, the epitome of Easter Rising....

And blossoms explode from blackthorn and cherry, spring's fusilladoes fired (as Charles Causley commemorated Keats at Teignmouth)....

The ground is bright with celandine, and I find my second bluebell, then another.....

The sweet spring now is come'ng

In beautiful sunshine

Thorns bud and wild flowers blooming

Daisey and Celadine

Something so sweet there is about the spring....

John Clare was an extraordinary man, and a brilliant poet, at his best.  

On some occasions, however, perhaps his love of nature was stronger than his literary skill....

How beautiful is spring! the sun gleams gold,

Reflecting like a mirror, burnished ever;....

- the true believer

Sees flowers in bloom and hears the woodlands ring,

With joys awake: - how beautiful is spring! -

I get the point.  But it is a bit Fotherington-Tomas (you kno he sa Hullo clouds Hullo sky he is a girlie and love the scents and sounds of nature tho the less i smell and hear them the better.)

Thank you Nigel Molesworth, who claims that Peotry is sissy stuff that rhymes.  (Weedy people say la and fie and swoon when they see a bunch of daffodils....)

As it is, I note a buzzard returning to her nest.....

And then I hear the unmistakable sound of a tiny Chiff Chaff, just crashing in to land above my head....

And then I see a Brimstone, flitting just beyond my lens.... but then a Comma tires and rests awhile on a board fence in the sun, immobile while I steal his precious time, his punctuation brief.....

All token spring and every day

Green and more green hedges and close

And every where appears

Still tis but March

But still that March is Spring

 And the robin still trills his warning song....

And the kite still haunts us overhead.....

Fields meadows woods and pastures

Theres spring in every place

From winters wild disasters

All wear her happy face

Beast on their feet and birds upon the wing

The very clouds upon the sky look spring

(But we are not out of the woods yet....)

[Peotry (sic) by John Clare, 1793 - 1864]

The Turning World

Poetry walks

Sheep may safely graze on pasture
When the shepherd guards them well.
Where rulers govern well
we may feel peace and rest
and what makes countries happy

The Turning World is the title of an anthology of poems complied by D J Brinley in 1968 when he found, as a young teacher, that there was a total lack of suitable textbooks to interest teenagers in poetry.

At my school, poetry was delivered and consumed in a variety of ways.  At an early stage we were made to memorise The Brook,  in Nigel Molesworth fashion (Peotry is sissy stuff that rhymes.) 

i come from haunts of coot and hern

i make a sudden sally

and-er-hem-er-hem-the fern

to bicker down a valley….

Down with Skool!  

Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle

Though in How to be Topp, Molesworth offers some conciliation to English teachers….

However there are other poems which creep in from time to time there is one which go

Har fleag har fleag har fleag onward

Into the er rode the 600

            There are as well lars porsena of clusium elegy in country churchyard loss of the royal george and chevy chase.  Anything to do with daffodils is also grate favourite of English masters…..

As pupils we were issued with Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and I still have my copy – it is in remarkably good condition; rarely used, I think a bookseller might say.

So it was that when I became an English teacher myself, the compilation by Mr Brinley was most welcome (pace Palgrave – I do actually treasure it).  I doubt whether I influenced many young minds, but perhaps some of my pupils found words and rhythms in these pages to amuse or console.  I learned that at times the clarity of D H Lawrence worked well:

Climbing through the January snow, into the Lobo canyon

Dark grow the spruce-trees, blue is the balsam, water

sounds still unfrozen, and the trail is still evident.

Mountain Lion

Thomas Hardy’s Christmas: 1924 gave us something to contemplate:

‘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.

At the going down of the sun...

And T.S.Eliot’s Preludes always led to sparks of creativity:

The winter evening settles down

With smells of steaks in passageways.

Six o’clock.

The burnt-out ends of smoky days….

Red Kite hunting

I did not know it then, but it was Eliot, rehearsing the word burnt, that gave my text-book its name.  In Burnt Norton, the first of  his Four Quartets, written in 1935, he wrote:

At the still point of the turning world.  Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement…..

Kestrel hunting

One time the world hangs still is the depth of winter, the short days of Christmas in the north, when time seems to stall, and days hardly get off the ground.  There is a sense, just after Christmas, that things have come to a halt; the excesses of the celebrations merge with the darkness and the world seems stuck.  Then, almost suddenly, into the New Year, and days seem to lengthen, the birds seem to sing; the air is more alive…..  Eliot’s theme of air blends with the wood smoke of Burnt Norton’s winter fires, and the dance begins again…..

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight

Even while the dust moves

There rises the hidden laughter

Of children in the foliage

Quick now, here, now, always –

Ridiculous the waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

Peotry (sic) perhaps has had its day – the young, no longer in one another’s arms (though very much online), may not have the time to decipher the codes of learned bards, but the art of composing words into shapes and lines is not yet dead.

There is a green hill....

Wordsworth gave good advice, in Up! Up! My Friend!

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;

Our meddling intellect

Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:-

We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;

Close up those barren leaves;

Come forth, and bring with you a heart

That watches and receives.

O still, small voice of calm

So we walk in the turning world, watching birds making the most of air. Winter has not yet done its worst, perhaps, and fortune smiles for a day or two.  While earnest poets compete this weekend for the Poetry Book Society T S Eliot Prize, this year, the fiftieth anniversary of Eliot’s death, amounting to £20,000 for the winner and £1,500 for each of the ten short-listed competitors, we look for poetry in the landscape and wildlife around us.  

Though it is 98 years since the death of Edward Thomas, his words are still alive:

But these things also are Spring’s –

On banks by the roadside the grass

Long-dead that is greyer now

Than all the Winter it was….

While the North blows, and starling flocks

By chattering on and on

Keep their spirits up in the mist,

And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.

But These Things Also

The countryside is full of life, and death.  I watch the birds of prey as they scan the fields for voles, unsuspecting lives to take.  

Kestrel hovering

I watch the blackbird as he cleans his beak from wormy residues.  

We scatter flocks of starlings, 

goldfinches, 

fieldfare.  

Larks rise up in alarm, twitter and flit, then fall again to earth.  

Skylark

Pigeons strip the new shoots from the crops; 

Woodpigeon en masse

crows grasp and stab all things they can.  

In the air, flights criss and cross, from late late dawn to early dusk.  The greatest gift, perhaps, is that life goes on.

Words move, music moves

Only in time; but that which is only living

Can only die.

Burnt Norton

Just as we turned for home, I caught a sequence of aerial combat that could have shown real feathers flying, but which, as if to show us how, ended in peace.

Buzzard to Base, tumbleweed, OK?

Bandit on tail

Check six

Locking on, BFM

Dive dive dive

Holding hands?

OK Kestrel, RTB

B-LOC, Bingo

A final image from these walks is these two lovebirds.  Spring is in the air! And poetry is love.....

Jack and Jill Daw

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time

Burnt Norton

T S Eliot

However, the final final last word must be Nigel Molesworth's, as he reads to the class from The Burial Sir of Sir John Moore Sir at Corunna Sir (A titter from 2B they are wet and i will tuough them up after.)

Notadrumwasheardnotafuneralnote

shut up peason larffing

As his corse

As his corse

what is a corse sir? gosh is it

to the rampart we carried

(whisper you did not kno your voice was so lovely)

Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot.

PING!

Shut up peason i know sir he's blowing peas at me

Oer the grave where our hero was buried.

(A pause a grave bow i retire and Egad! peason hav placed a dainty pin upon mine seat. Fie!)