National Poetry Month #26

 My old Boss (ie, my Boss in days gone by and my Boss who is an old chap - much older than me) used to tease me about my inclination for Philip Larkin. This Boss, who would choose Lowell over many others! 

Anyway, he's in London and far from the Campfire, so I have no hesitation in indulging this particular proclivity. I'll limit myself to one poem though, chosen in response to a poem by Jack Gilbert, left by a person who joined us by the Campfire last night, beneath that terribly evocative Moon; a person I know slightly but deeply - yes, that's possible - whose too infrequent presence almost outweighs the intense, black-hole mass of her absence.

I knew Gilbert's name, but that's all, so I looked him up and read of him and read some of his poems. That's what you're supposed to do during National Poetry Month (and other times). He got into uni because of a clerical error! Most of the other stories about him are false. He published sparsely and was defiantly unfashionable. In the first three of his poems I read tonight, I found these gems:

• "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly" (- something my old French teacher often said and which I never understood, though most others in the class did.)

• "Icarus was not failing as he fell but just coming to the end of his triumph."

• "Teach me mortality, frighten me/into the present. Help me to find/the heft of these days. That the nights/will be full enough and my heart feral."

The heft of these days; my heart feral. Wow.

Now, buggrit, I must decide on Gilbert's Collected Poems, or the new Kaweco fountain pen. (Both extortionately but not quite prohibitively expensive!)

But, to Larkin. I love the rhyme here, and the way you have to emphasise certain words and pause before others, in order to have the poem read true and make sense...

XXV by Philip Larkin

Morning has spread again

Through every street,

And we are strange again;

For should we meet

How can I tell you that

Last night you came

Unbidden, in a dream?

And how forget

That we had worn down love good-humouredly,

Talking in fits and starts

As friends, as they will be

Who have let passion die within their hearts.

Now, watching the red east expand,

I wonder love can have already set

In dreams, when we've not met

More times than I can count on one hand.