Authors Electric

 An Introduction to Romantic Poetry This month I was completely out of ideas but then I remembered Elizabeth Kay's excellent piece about poetry on AuthorsElectric last month. I looked back on the subject in my files and there I found A n Introduction to Romantic Poetry, relating to a course I taught in Northampton not so very long ago. I was also reminded of a fantastic group of poetry students, some of whom I still meet up with on Zoom. We read through this introduction together at the beginning of the course, breaking off to discuss various points, such as my visit to Christchurch Priory below in 1970, so here goes... Christchurch Priory   ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive/But to be young was very heaven’, so wrote Wordsworth in his 13 book poem,  The Prelude , which was subtitled,  Growth of a Poet’s   Mind , and which wasn’t published in its entirety until after his death in 1850. The lines are about the French Revolution and in 1791 Wordswor...

My heart leaps up when I behold       A rainbow in the sky:  So was it when my life began;  So is it now I am a man;  So be it when I shall grow old,       Or let me die!  The Child is father of the Man;  And I could wish my days to be  Bound each to each by natural piety .  William Wordsworth, British School, By anonymous - Art UK, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/ index.php?curid=97545046 I know, I know, I don't usually begin my post with a Wordsworth poem but today I couldn't help it. That wonderful line, one of the poet's most famous, keeps going round and round in my head (for reasons which will become clear if you stay with me).  But first, how does this Child is father of the Man idea even work? No child can beget (if anyone uses that word anymore) his or her parents, that's just nonsense. Yet in the context of this delightful poem it’s clear Wordsworth’s meaning is both simpler and deep...

This is the story of James, a man in his sixties, living with Asperger’s and impaired vision. James is an only child who has lived at home all his life, except when he was away as a teenager at a school for the blind. He has also left home on occasion to be involved in quiz programmes. His mother, Margaret,  suffered k idney failure so, from age 13, James helped care for her in the school holidays when his father was at work. Then, later, when his father also became ill, James was glad to look after them both. He underwent some eye operations which improved his sight. They were a very happy family. James’s mother, died in 2017 and from that time James and his father seemed to become objects of suspicion to Social Services. This culminated in James’s father being forced into a care home after he had been admitted to hospital with an attack of gastro-enteritis.  As I listened to this part of James’s story my heart sank – I have heard too many long sad tales from people who fee...

April 2016 Happy Daffs  Five years ago on this date I was giving  thanks for the joy of daffodils . I was bearing witness to the blessed moments of relief given by their inherent gaiety to my mother’s poor tired mind as her dementia worsened and paranoia set in. It wasn’t long before we were forced to admit that the illness was overwhelming her and she needed to move into the dementia nursing unit where, finally, she would die. Meanwhile, in April 2016, there was a neglected strip of flower bed opposite the window of her extra care flat. After ripping out the couch grass and cutting back the dead twigs, we planted two small clumps of daffodils. Mum's flat was increasingly filled with ghosts and murderers that set her screaming in the dark and me hurtling down the 60 miles of main road attempting to hold them at bay. In the end I lost that battle, but this time five years ago, my main allies were those daffodils. I wrote Even in the time of sundowners when Mum’s brain is exhaus...

And old Peter Duck looked down at her from the top of the quay and wished he was going too. 'Going foreign she is, to blue water,’ he said to himself. And he thought of other little schooners he had known, on the Newfoundland Banks and in the South Seas. He thought of flying fish and porpoises racing each other and turning over in the waves. He thought of the noise of the wind in the shrouds, and the glow of the lamp on a moving compass card, and tall winds swaying across the stars at night. And he wished he could go to sea once more and make another voyage before it was too late. I don’t think it’s possible to read this passage (from chapter one of Arthur Ransome’s   Peter Duck) without a sense of longing. I’d like you to read it at my funeral, should you happen to be there. We printed it as the frontispiece for my mother’s service sheet, together with a photo of her climbing up the jetty at Eversons in Woodbridge in about 1947.  The cruellest thing I ever did t...