JOHN BETJEMAN

CHRISTMAS by John Betjeman

CHRISTMAS 

The bells of waiting Advent ring,

The Tortoise stove is lit again

And lamp-oil light across the night

Has caught the streaks of winter rain

In many a stained-glass window sheen

From Crimson Lake to Hookers Green.

The holly in the windy hedge

And round the Manor House the yew

Will soon be stripped to deck the ledge,

The altar, font and arch and pew,

So that the villagers can say

‘The church looks nice’ on Christmas Day.

Provincial Public Houses blaze,

Corporation tramcars clang,

On lighted tenements I gaze,

Where paper decorations hang,

And bunting in the red Town Hall

Says ‘Merry Christmas to you all’.

And London shops on Christmas Eve

Are strung with silver bells and flowers

As hurrying clerks the City leave

To pigeon-haunted classic towers,

And marbled clouds go scudding by

The many-steepled London sky.

And girls in slacks remember Dad,

And oafish louts remember Mum,

And sleepless children’s hearts are glad.

And Christmas-morning bells say ‘Come!’

Even to shining ones who dwell

Safe in the Dorchester Hotel.

And is it true,

This most tremendous tale of all,

Seen in a stained-glass window’s hue,

A Baby in an ox’s stall ?

The Maker of the stars and sea

Become a Child on earth for me ?

And is it true ? For if it is,

No loving fingers tying strings

Around those tissued fripperies,

The sweet and silly Christmas things,

Bath salts and inexpensive scent

And hideous tie so kindly meant,

No love that in a family dwells,

No carolling in frosty air,

Nor all the steeple-shaking bells

Can with this single Truth compare -

That God was man in Palestine

And lives today in Bread and Wine.

A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES BY DYLAN THOMAS

Many of us have Christmas traditions and one of mine is reading this delightful short story by Dylan Thomas.   Here's an extract.   The story can be found and read online. 

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver. Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house. "What shall we give them? Hark the Herald?" 
"No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the dark door. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen ... And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town. 
"Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said. 
"Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading. 
"Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that. 

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the little house. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

POEM BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950).  Renascence and Other Poems.  1917.

22. “If I should learn, in some quite casual way”

Sonnet V

IF I should learn, in some quite casual way,     That you were gone, not to return again— Read from the back-page of a paper, say,     Held by a neighbor in a subway train, How at the corner of this avenue         5     And such a street (so are the papers filled) A hurrying man—who happened to be you—     At noon to-day had happened to be killed, I should not cry aloud—I could not cry     Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place—         10 I should but watch the station lights rush by     With a more careful interest on my face, Or raise my eyes and read with greater care Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

Ted Chippington - PULL UP

LOVELIEST OF TREES BY A. E. HOUSMAN

A poem I can relate to through age and this time of year - winter is here for those visitors from other continents.  

A. E. Housman (1859–1936).  A Shropshire Lad.  1896.

II. Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough, And stands about the woodland ride Wearing white for Eastertide.   Now, of my threescore years and ten,         5 Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more.   And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room,         10 About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.

THANK YOU

Thank you for all the positive feedback and responses to my last two poems.   Much appreciated.

Stephen

THE JOURNEY OF THE MAGI

With Christmas in mind, T.S. Eliot's contemplative Journey of the Magi.

The Journey Of The Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sorefooted, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
and running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kiking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

NORFOLK

How did the Devil come? When first attack?
    These Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence,
The years fall off and find me walking back
    Dragging a stick along the wooden fence
Down this same path, where, forty years ago,
My father strolled behind me, calm and slow.

I used to fill my hands with sorrel seeds
    And shower him with them from the tops of stiles,
I used to butt my head into his tweeds
    To make him hurry down those languorous miles
Of ash and alder-shaded lanes, till here
Our moorings and the masthead would appear.

There after supper lit by lantern light
    Warm in the cabin I could lie secure
And hear against the polished sides at night
    The lap lap lapping of the weedy Bure,
A whispering and watery Norfolk sound
Telling of all the moonlit reeds around.

How did the Devil come? When first attack?
    The church is just the same, though now I know
Fowler of Louth restored it. Time, bring back
    The rapturous ignorance of long ago,
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts,
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.

John Betjamen

AT BUXTON LIBRARY

In the library until they throw me out at 7,  finishing some research and keeping warm.  

CHILDREN'S SONG

A lovely poem from the great Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, recalling the mysterious world of childhood and how adults are excluded from it.   I particularly like the fact that the poem is  from a child's perspective.

Children’s Song

We live in our own world,
A world that is too small
For you to stoop and enter
Even on hands and knees,
The adult subterfuge.
And though you probe and pry
With analytic eye,
And eavesdrop all our talk
With an amused look,
You cannot find the centre
Where we dance, where we play,
Where life is still asleep
Under the closed flower,
Under the smooth shell
Of eggs in the cupped nest
That mock the faded blue
Of your remoter heaven.

R S Thomas

Hannah Arendt

A truly remarkable woman I would have liked to have met.   Her philosophy is profound and positive,  offering hope in the uniqueness of people and of their capacity to change.   We are not commodities or merely homogenised  units of consumption but truly remarkable and different from the animals by our capacity to forgive and to make and keep promises.

A woman who experienced great personal loss and turmoil including her need to flee Nazi Germany and to witness her former lover and former lecturer Heidegger condone through inactivity,  National Socialism and it's anti-semitic policies.   Forced to flee Germany she eventually settled in the USA becoming the first female professor of politics at Princeton University.

Arendt coined the phrase the 'banality of evil'  and her seminal book Eichmann in Jerusalem follows this theme.  


"Your birth was a truly new beginning, an opportunity for something to come into being that was not there before."

Keys to the door by Mohsin Hamid

I loved your age of wonder: your third and fourth 
and fifth years spent astonished, widening your eyes 
at each new trick of the world – and me standing there, 
solemnly explaining how it was done. The moon and stars,
rainbows, photographs, gravity, the birds in the air, 
the difference between blood and water.
In true life? you would say, looking up 
and I would nod, like some broken-hearted sage, 
knowing there would be no answers soon
to all the big questions that were left, to cruelty and fear,
to age and grief and death, and no words either. 
And you, like me, will sit and shake your head.
In true life? Yes, my sweet, strong daughter, I’m afraid 
there is all this as well, and this is it: true life.

(2012)

A BREAK FROM WRITING

I always carry a note-book to catch any thoughts that might decide to visit, usually at the unlikeliest of moments and places, as yesterday proved, whilst on a bus.  The bus was full, so I sat on the back seats, the ones that face in the opposite direction from the one the bus is travelling.  I started to think how strange it is to see where we have been rather than where we are going, so out came the book to jot down some thoughts and impressions. 

Of course many of the people sat on the rear seats facing me thought it strange, especially as I was writing into a book rather than reading one, and more strange that I was not playing with my mobile, or listening to music, or both.  Another issue is of course, that people think you may be writing down your impressions of them, a justifiable suspicion, as I generally am.  A degree of tact and discretion is therefore called upon, with one hand discreetly placed above the pages, in order to deflect prying eyes.  Coffee shops are also good places to think and to people watch, jotting down mannerisms and verbal ticks. I find a short or a long walk is also really good to get the ideas flowing,  

The picture below was taken outside a coffee shop, the note-book within reach but out of sight.

Do you have any strategies that you find help you clear the mind or cultivate thoughts?  I would welcome your own insights into your own creative processes.  

UNFINISHED POEM BY PHILIP LARKIN

Philip Larkin in a library. Photograph by Fay Godwin. © The British Library Board (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A wonderful poem from a poet who had by 1951 pulled off the yoke of Hardy and come out of Auden's shadow.  I particularly enjoy how it confounds our expectations, especially in the final stanza which never fails to bring a lump to my throat.  What do you think, I'd love to hear your comments.

I squeezed up the last stair to the room in the roof
And lay on the bed there with my jacket off.
Seeds of light were sown on the failure of evening.
The dew came down. I lay in the quiet, smoking.

That was a way to live—newspaper for sheets,
A candle and spirit stove, and a trouble of shouts
From below somewhere, a town smudgy with traffic!
That was a place to go, that emaciate attic!

For (as you will guess) it was death I had in mind,
Who covets our breath, who seeks and will always find;
To keep out of his thought was my whole care,
Yet down among the sunlit courts, yes, he was there,

Taking his rents; yes, I had only to look
To see the shape of his head and the shine of his book,
And the creep of the world under his sparrow-trap sky,
To know how little slips his immortal memory.

So it was stale time then, day in, day out,
Blue fug in the room, nothing to do but wait
The start of his feet on the stair, that sad sound
Climbing to cut me from his restless mind

With a sign that the air should stick in my nose like bread,
The light swell up and turn black—so I shammed dead,
Still as a stuck pig, hoping he’d keep concerned
With boys who were making the fig when his back was turned;

And the sun and the stove and the mice and the gnawed paper
Made up the days and nights when I missed supper,
Paring my nails, looking over the farbelow street
Of tramways and bells. But one night I heard the feet.

Step after step they mounted with confidence.
Time shrank. They paused at the top. There was no defence.
I sprawled to my knees. Now they came straight at my door.
This, then, the famous eclipse? The crack in the floor

Widening for one long plunge? In a sharp trice,
The world, lifted and wrung, dipped with remorse.
The fact of breathing tightened into a shroud.
Light cringed. The door swung inwards. Over the threshold

Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused,
Nothing like death has such hair, arms so raised.
Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come?
Why is he not here? What summer have you broken from?

Philip Larkin

SHAKE HANDS

Shake Hands Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over;      I only vex you the more I try. All's wrong that ever I've done or said, And nought to help it in this dull head:      Shake hands, here's luck, good-bye. But if you come to a road where danger      Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share, Be good to the lad that loves you true And the soul that was born to die for you,      And whistle and I'll be there.   A.E. Housman

GREAT LETTER FROM HOUSMAN

GHOST - FROM "LIVING IN A SPAR TOWN"

GHOST

I frightened myself the other day

By what I now do and by what I now say

That wasn’t the mouse of one year ago

Who wouldn’t say boo and took every blow,

On the chin with good grace and

Forgave every foe

And would suffer the strife for a quieter life.

That formerly me is now RIP

Deceased and dispatched

When my new self was hatched

I like the new me who possesses my home

Who sneaks up and shocks me when we’re alone.

© Stephen Evans 2014

RANT EXTRACT FROM MEAN LITTLE TOWN FROM "LIFE IN A SPAR TOWN".

The art centre’s run by pricks

The real ale pubs are full of dicks

The town hall staff are uber rude

The cab drivers are f**king crude

The chintzy stores are full of crap

The pastry shop is full of pap

All the roads are full of holes

The garden centre's full of hoes

The Norman Church is always closed

The library's only got two books

The council chamber's full of crooks

The music scene is f**king dead

The f**king kids are all inbred

The farmer’s market’s f**king rank

The cafe bars are f**king w*nk

The pot-holed car parks all are locked

The dogging scene is all half-cocked

The tourist board is run by snobs

The rugby club is full of yobs

The sports complex is full of slobs

The migrant workers came for jobs

Took one look and f**ked right off

To a kinder fascist state regime

‘Cause they too know,  when they've seen

A mean  'n' nasty town.

Stephen Evans (c) 2014