Friday's poetry rabbit holes
The light and I wait for you
I have launched a new membership section on my website. It is £6 a month. It’s for people who like the idea of following small trails of thought at the end of the week.
Every Friday I will post one of my poems plus an audio recording. I will then explore its literary, philosophical, artistic, scientific, cultural and high-weirdness influences with plenty of rabbit holes for you to fall into. All poems are microcosms of macrocosms, this is a way of playing with that idea.
I began this last Friday and am sharing that first post (minus the recording) here for your interest. I have also just uploaded the second post on my website.
The light and I wait for you
Flight-winged book on my lap, tea in steam,
window-silhouetted to be the first sight you’d see –
I’m a painting by Vanessa Bell. Light loses its pose,
passing like gossip from the turpentine energy
of new afternoon to a wrinkle of quarter past three,
then out to that smudging evening maybe. You might
be in a cab coming home, you could be caught still
in the golden mouth of the city, over which I watch
thoughts of birds tunneling through sky. At a distance
things are symbols. Closer, questions. The door starts.
Every fresh, stepped-back look, another chance.I’m with C.S. Lewis when he said “you can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” If you’ve got tea and books you don’t need much else. This poem opens with these two gloriously sensual fundamentals of existence.
Lewis’s well-known statement is often taken at face-value. Yes, all book-lovers and tea-lovers agree, aren’t books and tea lovely? But we ignore the unfulfilled, almost naked need threaded throughout the words. There is never a cup of tea large enough, never a book long enough.
There’s an enjoyable subversion in an aphorism printed cosily on a thousand tea towels being a shared declaration of how we’re trapped in our own insatiability.
Desire as Infinite Regress. There is never an end to wanting what it is we enjoy. Yearning is boundless.
C.S. Lewis is most famous for writing the Narnia series. (He also wrote the far less well-known Space Trilogy which is worth a read.) And he’s also famous for writing many books of Christian apologetics.
‘Apologetics’ is a branch of theology that involves itself with defending the religion. Lewis has a beautiful book called Surprised By Joy, a partial autobiography about his coming to faith. You need not be a Christian to take great pleasure in the discussions he has with Tolkein and, one of my favourite thinkers, Owen Barfield, about faith, mysticism and God.
His use of the word ‘joy’ to signify the blissful feeling that always seems just out-of-reach is inspired.
Surprised by Joy is named after this William Wordsworth poem.
My poem above shares a lot with the Wordsworth poem and Lewis’s use of ‘joy’. What is this boundless yearning we carry everywhere?
Lewis’s wife, was the American poet Joy Davidman. He realised he had fallen in love with her around the time she received a terminal cancer diagnosis. Their affair is depicted in Shadowlands.
Look again. In my poem above, the book is open and unread on the speaker’s lap and the tea is not being drunk, but sitting aside and steaming. It seems as if an even greater desire than the simple pleasures has overwhelmed the speaker.
That desire is to appear as a symbol to a lover who may or may not return soon. We’ve all done this. Posed. Behaved as a symbol, rather than a human.
Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse wrote, “she felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.”
Virginia Woolf’s sister was Vanessa Bell, I love her work. I find a simultaneous stillness and rich action in her paintings. That’s the quality the speaker in the poem is trying to achieve.
The Other Room, late 1930s.
“To the end of her life, she painted pictures replete with psychological interest, while at the same time firmly denying that the story of a picture had any importance whatsoever.” said her son Quentin Bell.
You read in the poem ideas of existence as a painting – ‘turpentine energy’ and the ‘smudging evening maybe’.
I think when we live in cities – particular the celebrated ones like Paris, New York or London, we can’t help but see our days as having the quality of visual art. This is the seduction of metropolises and I was thinking of that in the phrase ‘the golden mouth of the city’.
When I wrote the poem however I didn’t know of other uses of that phrase – subsequently I came across the Italian folktales of Bocca d’Oro – translated as ‘golden mouth’ and the discovery in 2021 of Egyptian mummies with gold tongues, believed to have been to help the dead speak with gods in the afterlife.
This is a poem about seeing from a distance and seeing from intimacy. Here’s a beautiful Lithub essay – Philosophies of Distance and Proximity: Who Are We When We’re Alone?’
Thank you, as ever, for sparking thoughts.
It seems the universe is directing me to finish reading Surprised By Joy (I started it 3 years ago, wild-camping for a week on the hill where the boy Merlin made his first prophesy; snatched insomniac pages read by 2am headtorch on a bed of tick-filled bracken while Queen Elizabeth II died; rain disintegrated the book before Lewis had had the chance to be truly surprised).
Lewis is suddenly everywhere (there's a new Narnia tale in the book I recently published; I've been dipping into Screwtape; and at the Folklore Centre in Todmorden, I bought a copy of his Pilgrim's Regress... which opens with a fab prologue on Romanticism as the infinite regress of desire).
I can never find an afternoon long enough in which to completely read these books.