Sunday 23.12.2018 at Rowlands Gill woods: I had, or so it seemed, the entire woods to myself and Mac. This was the scene at about 4.30 pm as darkness fell. The woodland paths were not dry like Yeats's. It was, of couse, not autumn. What wonderful solitude! And as I walked I ws saying Yeats and Churchill to myself with great joy. The text of the verse below is the result of endless repetition to myself on dog-walks, usually without reference to the original text, whereby, no doubt, certain errors have become ingrained!
Today's verse: (remembered, accurately or not with respect to William Butler Yeats' original) a few hours later):
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under an October twilight, the water mirrors a still sky,
Upon the brimmng waters, among the stones,
Are nine and fifty swans.
Ninteen autumns have come upon me
Since I first made my count,
I saw, before I had well-finished,
All suddenly mount,
And scatter in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon these brilliant creatures
But now my heart is sore,
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time upon this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover-by-lover,
They paddle the cool companionable streams,
Or climb the air,
Their hearts have not grown old,
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still waters,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool?
(This is the end of the (portion? of) the poem as worked-on recently, but the copy I have worked-with does not show whether this is the end of the poem, or only the end of page 1 of the poem).
And by Winston Churchill:
I have myslef full confidence,
That if all do their duty,
A\nd if nothing is neglected,
And the best arrangements are made
- as indeed they are being made,
We shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home,
To ride out the storm of war,
And outline the menace of tyranny,
If necessay for years,
If necessary alone.
At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do.
That is the resolve of His Majesy's Govern ent - every man of them,
And that is the will of Parliament and the People.
The British Empire and the French Republic,
Linked together in their cause and their need,
Will defend to the death their native soil,
Aiding each other like true comrades,
To the utmost of their strength.
And even though large sectors of Europe,
And many old and famous states,
Have fallen and may fall, into the grip of the Gestapo,
And all the odious apparatus of Nahhzi rule,
We shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end:
We shal fight in France,
We shall fight on the seas and the oceans.
We shall fight with growing conidence and growing strength in the air.
We shall defend our island home, whatever the cost may be:
We shall fight on the beaches,
We shall fight on the landing grounds,
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
We shall fight in the hills,
We shall never surrender.
And even if, which I do not for a moment believe,
This island, or a significant portion of it were subjugated and starving,
Then, our empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet,
Would carry on the struggle until,
In God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might,
Came to the rescue and liberation of the old.
And before I got back to the meadown bordering the busy busy busy (A694?) Station Road, Rowlands Gil, I recalled the simple joy of Addlestrop, by Edward Thomas:
Yes, I remember Addlestrop, the name,
Because one afternoon of heat,
The express train drew-up there unwontedly.
It was late-June.
The steam hissed
Someone cleared his throat.
No one came and no one left on the bare platform.
What I swa was 'Addlestrop', only the name.
And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
Meadow-sweet and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lowly fare than the high cloudlets in the sky,
And for that minute a blackbird sang close by,
And round him, mistier, father and father,
All the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
It's the blackbird in the third-from-last line, that does it for me.
And the 'mistier, father and father' phrase.
And the reference to 'Oxfordshire and Gloucestrershire'.
Somehow, those two counties bring-in, for me, home and Archer Cowley's home territory and my father's working life in those counties, and so on. He was aged 8 in 1913 when (I think I recall reading somewhere) Edward Thomas may have written those lines.
(Continued on 25.12.2018 at 1236hrs):
From the New Testament: (as ever. completely 'unseen' - hence the mistakes):
And behold a lawyear stood up and tempted him saying:
'Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?';
And He said to him: 'What is written in the law?'
How readest thou?'
And he, replying, said:
'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God,
With all your mind,
With all your strength,
With all your spirit,
And thy neighbour as thyself';
And He said: 'Thou hast answered right,
This do, and thou shalt live'.
But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus:
'And who is my neighbour?'
And Jesus said unto him:
'A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho,
And he fell among thieves,
Which stripped him of his raiment,
And wounded him,
And departed, leaving him half-dead.'
'And by chance, there came down a certain priest that way,
And when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.
And likewise a Levite,
When he was at the place,
Came and looked on him,
And passed by on the other side.
But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed,
Came where he was,
And when he saw him, he had compassion on him,
And he came to him,
And bound up his wounds,
Pouring-in oil and wine,
And set him on his own beast,
And brought him to an inn,
And took care of him.
And on the morrow,
As he departed,
He took out two pence and gave them to the host, saying:
'Thake care of him,
And whatsoever thou spendest more,
When I come again, I will repay thee'.
Which now, of these three, thinkest thou,
Was neighbour unto him that fell among thieves?
And he answered: 'He that showed compassion on him'.
And He said unto him: 'Go and do thou likewise'.
It seems to me that this story is the core adn the key to the message of the New Testament, not to mention the Christmas story about 'With the poor, the mean, and lowly, etc. We all could do well to give these sentiments more of our attention. (25.12.2018 at 1254hrs).
Coninued on Wednesday 27/12/2018 at 0017hrs:
By William Shakespeare:
She should have died heretofore, there would have been time.......
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays
Have lighted fools the way to dusty death;
Out out brief candle,
Life's but a walking shadow,
A poor player that struts and frets his time upon the stage;
It is a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
**************************
From The Tempest:
Our revels now are ended,
These our actors,
As I foretold you
Were all spirits,
And are faded into air
Into thin air,
And like the insubstantial fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers,
The Golden palaces,
The solemn temples,
The great globe itself,}
Yea all which it inhabit,
Shall fade away,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded
Shall disolve and leave not a rack behind.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on,
And our litle lives are rounded with a sleep.
(Those last two lines were spelled-out in 'embossed' wooden text around the (arts and crafts-style?) wardrobe in my maternal grandmother and grandfather's home at 90 Surbiton Road, Surbiton, in the 1950s, when I visited by bicycle from Oxford and stayed to pursue my hobby of railway-watching at the local Surbiton station (on the Waterloo to Souhtampton line) and elsewhere in greater London.).
29.12.2018 at 1830hrs:
By Rudyard Kipling:
If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs, and blamng it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowence for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting;
Or being lied about not deal in lies;
Or being hated not give way to hating,
And yet not look too good nor talk too wise
If you can dream and not make dreams your master;
If you can think and not make thoughts your aim:
If you can meet with tirumph and disaster
And treat those two imposers just the same.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools;
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop to build them up with worn out tools;
(Continued 29.12.18):
If you can make a heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss
And lose and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss.
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the will that says to them "Hold on!"
If your can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
if all men count with you but none too much.
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the earth and everything within it,
And, which is more
You'll be a man my son! (29.12.2018 at 2359hrs)
31.12.2018 at 1843hrs:
Edward Thomas:
Yes, I remember Addlestrop, the name
Because one afternoon of heat
The express train drew up there unwontedly,
It was late June.
The steam hissed
Somone cleared his throat
No one left and no one came on the bare platform
What I saw was 'Addlestrop'. Only the name,
And willows, willow herb, and grass
Meadow sweet and haycocks dry
No whit less still and lowly fare than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute
A blackbird sang close by
And round him,
Mistier and mistier,
Father and father......
All the birds of Oxforshire and Gloucestershire.......(later same day: realised that this repeats the text above - may delete it...but, well, it shows the spontaneity of all this)
And Shakespeare again:
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? ("Soll ich dich einem sommertag vergleichen?" (per Paulina, GJA's German au pair in about 2016)
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
For every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,
Nor shall death brag thou wandrest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growers;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Ode to a nightingale:
My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense,
As though of hemlock I had drunk
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute since and lethewards had sunk
Tis not through envy[ of they happy lot
That thou, light-winged dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot of beechen-green
And shadows numberless
Singest of summer with full-throated ease.
Oh for a draught of vintage
That hath been cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of flora and the country-green,
Dance and prevencal song and sunburnt mirth
Oh for a beaker full of the true the blissful hippocrene
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth,
That I might drink and lever the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.
Fade far away, dissolve and qutie forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever and the fret,
Here where men sit and hear each other groan,
Where the palsy shakes a few sad last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale spectre-thin and dies,|
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs,
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new-love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
Away! Away! For I will fly to thee.
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards
But on the viewless wings of poesy,|
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards.
Alread with thee!
Tender is the night,
And haply the queen moon is already on her throne
Clustered around with all her starry faes
But here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms
And winding mossy ways.
I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the bow,
But in embalmed darkness
Guess each sweet with which
The seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket and the fruit-tree wild.
White hawthorn and the pastorl eglantine,
Fast-fading violets covfered-up in leaves,
And mid-May's eldest child:
The coming musk-rose
Full of dewy wine,
The murmorous haunt of flies on summer-eves.
Darkling I listen
And many a time I have been half in-love with easeful death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die.
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
Whilst thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad,
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing
And I have ears in vain.
To thy high rhapsody becmoe a sod.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down.
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown.
Perhaps the self-same song
That found a path through the said heart of Ruth
When, sick for home, she stood in tears amid the ailien corn,
The same that oft-times hath charmed magic casements
Opening on the foam of perilous seas, in fairy-lands forlorn.
Forlorn!
The very word is like a bell,
To toll me back from thee to my sole-self.
Adieu! The famcy cannot cheat so well as she is famed to do,
Deceiving elf.
Adieu. Adieu, Thy plaintive anthemn fades
Past the near-meadows,
Over the still-stream,
Up the hill-side
And now 'tis lost in the next valley glades.
Was it a vision or a waking dream?
Fled is that music.
Do I wake or sleep? John Keats.
(31.12.2018 at 2202hrs).
Gray's Elegy: (begun 24.3.19):
The curfew tolls the nell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly oe'r the lea;
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the wold to darkmess and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower,
The moping owl does to the moon complain,
Of such as wandering near her sacred bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
(26.3.19):
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many-a-mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-build shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, and the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Nor busy housewife ply her evening care,
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.