From Culbone Wood to Xanadu

An Extract from the Journal of a Poet, with a dysentery, in Remission, who the Previous Afternoon near Culbone Wood had written Kubla Khan (A Fragment)

I have borrowed what turned out to be a pruning knife from the farmer my host and cut a hole at the back of my britches in the place where I spoiled them with this afternoon's incontinence.  

Mindful that the knife edge might contaminate some future cut in the branch of an apple, I cleaned the blade well, and so hope to have avoided contributing to our fallen world's infection.

I have, these few days, in consequence of my indisposition, been dressed in a shepherd's smock - a character-reversing loan for one who had been reduced to nakedness.

And thus strive now to sing without circumlocution.

 *

Am I preoccupied with the Khan for this reason mainly: that here was a person to be envied for having more access to pulchritude than any man perhaps in universal history?

A fact that provokes me to recall how briefly in a day's activity is the act of congress and - most germane for man here - how melancholy and bereft (as summarised by Aristotle) the after-experience. [1]

There are texts in the Hindoo, so privately I have been told, which adumbrate in what must be sweet and lubricious detail the means by which erotic pleasure not only may be intensified but indefinitely prolonged. Such, no doubt is within the scope of persons of a leisured class, which like that of the Khan, enjoy the command of a complaisant gynaeceum and time to consummate what may be complicated theoretical and gymnastic recommendations.

All this is very well (if such information may be credited) but it begs the question of death. For is not such a prolongation of erotic expedition in effect based on a terror of the finish? (The plunge from suspended high tension and engorged horripilation through the vale of detumescence towards insipidity and indifference?)

And still during the sex act, we move restlessly and in a desperation of impatience for the end we overpoweringly desire and yet which, of all things, we most fear. The performance is accomplished in hurry and confusion, as though, as in a hunt, the quarry (our sensation) will escape us before we can intercept it. 

We know, but half forget, in the ferocity of our enlargement that we are approaching an extinction: and in that state we will fall back very quickly into the humdrum of our ordinary character: all passion evacuated and our infatuated bewilderment devolved to the routine sequence of our works and days. 

But during that half ecstasy whose fulfilment is both a completion and an annulment, we wish that an entire lifetime might be spent in this posture of luxurious animality and that it should never end…

Of course what I am contemplating is the male experience. From Tiresias we learn that female pleasure is inordinately the greater and so, by complement, more difficult to attain (as also from experience we know that a woman falls not into a melancholy lassitude but rather into a healthy call for the repeat!) Herein lies one of man's greatest duties and it is one, no doubt, that a majority of our young husbands experience as an oscillation between primitive satisfaction and an impotent shame. 

Any record of the Great Khan's own experience is of course irretrievable. But the notion that a potentate in command of immeasurable armies should, in private, have had sad and inadequate conjugal encounters renders me, even at this distance, melancholy. I will banish those imaginings and re-instate him as a stallion.

Rampant let the Great Khan stay

Among the beauties of Cathay:

Husband and lover, whose sweet pleasure

Has been ordained without measure.

May every latest and complete delight

Resurrect itself for him each night.

*

A confession. It was late. Past midnight. And in search of a fresh quill, I was barefoot, sans a candle, in the upper corridor, when I was witness to the womanhood of the young serving girl on whose singing I have reflected.

The door of her chamber was ajar and in the angle of its fore-edge and the door post, the girl's figure was visible, half lit by a candle which stood in a brass dish that lay at hip level on a dresser. The young woman was standing in a chiaroscuro in which the darkness to one side of the room was graduated in the proximity of the candle into a splintering aurora that surrounded the oily and pallid flame and the yellower burnish of the platter over which it stood. 

She had just then lifted her gown and it hung momentarily above her head, like a caul or waxy cerement as fashioned thinly by some carver - or closer perhaps to our circumstance on the farmstead, more like a cloud of chaff dust that hangs in a barn and which low sun lights through some cracks of its boarding. (My association is indeed with straw: for her hair, as though wet and gleaming in a dull thick gold was matted on her neck and lay accumulated at the shoulder). 

In addition to those ample parts on which it would be a prurience for me to expatiate, it was her face that I recall most clearly. As though Rembrandt had provided her with this, and it shone still unset from his rich and sombre palette, she was turned in my direction, and no doubt because I slid past quickly in the passage, she neither saw nor heard me: and so it was that her quiet features - in the composure of their innocence and self-possession - radiated themselves to me. 

Here was a woman in the splendour of her chastity, and I the brief intruder, illegitimately and in furtive, ashamed pleasure, a witness to her beauty: at once warmed by a small light and sheltered by the darkness: desirable of course to my manhood, but too precious at any cost to so much as to conceive of outraging with the slightest signal of my presence.

Like Actaeon, in violation of the chastity

And reservation of Diana's nakedness, I fled.

*

I will not pretend that this farm is where I had intended to arrive. And yet it was during an enforced residence that I composed my poem. No-one seeks displacement. But aberration conducts us along paths which we did not know existed. The more energetically we avoid them, the more powerfully they draw us to them. The labyrinth is a magnet.

*

Waiting. 

Boredom. Ordeal. Solitude. Despair. Disillusion. These are constituents with which we must content ourselves - and perforce observe the world that lies about us via the medium of a private and idiosyncratic trouble as though viewing it through an eye infection.

*

For what purpose should I take in this impression of a thorn bush filled with powder-blue and cloud-grey berries that stands shaken by the sea wind against the flint-cobbled wall of the harbour master's office?

My tentative response is this. What I contemplate in detail represents an aesthetical ingestion which is followed by its digestion. Then what, if not a line of poetry, must I thereby extrude - like the filament of silk I see this spider running, linking thorn to thorn, from the spirical in its posterior?

This singular thread is contrived into a daring and symmetrical pattern which is at once strong, subtle, iridescent and elastic. Presumably every species of arachnid spins a web which is patterned to an inherited tradition. And yet each web sits uniquely in keeping with the circumstance of its position. 

And for whom is this spider establishing so intricate a design which is so dangerously exposed to the weather that invades the sturdiest of thickets? The spider builds, as do all creatures, I suppose, for itself alone, and no doubt also for a progeny which will be posthumous to its little moment. 

Do not ask me, then, for whom I press out my poesy! This is not a pure silk suture oscillating to syllabic rhythms I've extruded. Rather, it is the thorns across which the meter involves, encores, devolves and hangs its pattern. And these lacerate the throat that calls them into being. Posterity only - for whom they're engendered - may adjudicate on the residue. 

*

Where sky and sea meet there exists a perfection of silence that we who are surrounded by land over which we beat our raucously percussive business have yet to learn from.

*

Somewhere along the footpath, rabbits have scratched away the grass to leave in the earth a small, red, concave scar in their attempt to burrow. An image of casually abandoned labour. This is one thing I comprehend perfectly.

*

Blackthorn grows easily to make these coastal hedges in despite of the ivy whose pleasure, it appears, is to strangle them. In this last connection, the ivy has put out its clusters of bubbling green flowers. These exude a mantle of honey whose odour is intoxicating but unpleasant. Wasps, bees and flies congregate on these sickeningly adhesive compound baubles, glutting themselves against the winter.

*

I am reminded of La Fontaine - his Ant and Grasshopper and its final half-line. It goes as follows:

Ant : Que faisiez-vous au temps chaud ?
Dit-elle à cette emprunteuse.

Grasshopper : Nuit et jour à tout venant
Je chantais, ne vous déplaise.

Ant : Vous chantiez ? J'en suis fort aise.
Eh bien ! Dansez maintenant. 

'Then dance!' concludes the Ant ('And starve!' her implication).  The savagest remark in any poem!

*

Few things please me more than the noise of my own footsteps in a bed of large, well-dried autumn leaves. This is the disposition of my childish mind speaking to the most august authority of an adult pair of boots and these latter reply with benign repeated condescension. And observe how each leaf is curled in its own special pattern and lies carefully among its fellows to create a transient and informal patchwork. The stones sunk in the path help divide all this into pleasing asymmetries. Now I smell everything, I am alive. (But it is growth which struggles with decomposition to which my nostrils are responding!)

*

A wren's eyebrow is a signal of its quick, nervous movements. The delicacy of this little creature. I have never understood why I continue to dislike it. Is it on account of its rivalrous self-confidence in maintaining a position among larger and more dignified species?

*

Once before, on this footpath, I shed my boots and stockings and for my pains was attacked by scarcely visible little insects (mites I have been told). I am that incomplete child of nature who revels in the effort of making a connection which might otherwise be spontaneous!

*

The silence of the woods broken by the flux of sea from below. My intestinal system works in harmony with that and I am at pains to hold myself in a posture that resembles human decency. Twice I squatted by the path and let fly with my bare arse. I mounted a tumulus of ivy and bracken on top of the stinking effluvium I had deposited and laid stones over these. Through the underwood, while I groaned out my innerds, I watched from above, the waves winnowing across the beach stones. (A third time, alas, and my britches were transformed to a noisome sack of faeces. Thus was my vision turned sadly inward.)

*

Through a tunnel of fallen trunks and a Virgilian forest canopy that descends to wilder water. Then another species of descent: a single beech leaf from invisibly high, conspicuously yellow in its spiral, before disappearing into anonymity. 

*

The contained energy of moorland and its defensive architecture of rock that thrusts, as though wanting more of itself, toward the ocean.

*

As though rolling without motive: all these spiny chestnut husks underfoot like a congregation of hedgehog babies.

*

Gazing from Culbone Wood downward: the sea is in the branches. Pine sap and ocean run together in a single current.

*

To my left the inexorable hillside. To the right the enormity of an abysm. My quill hesitates as though in the expectation of a commentary to this picturesque natural drama. Even the small birds tacent, schweigen - as in Goethe's short lyric, the immensity of whose implications for an intellectual and spiritual life are in my consciousness often. 'Ruhest du auch': ambiguous asseveration! We quietly wonder if he speaks to a companion (whether or not present) or to himself or to both.

Either way, the poem is one both of love and instruction. Love, in that the poem expresses supple and warm relations between the articulating self, the beauty of the natural world and (most probably) another human being to whom the poem is addressed.

Indeed. The poem is also a gift: in itself a vehicle of affection and it instructs in directing us to a passivity which may be learned from birds, mountains and tree-tops which have entered a condition of hush. If the poem is in part spoken to the poet's own (or other!) self, then he is directing himself to a situation of receptivity, without which genuine poetic experience would for ever be out of reach.

Of germane interest is the implication of distance. The poet speaks from ground level in a forest solitude and refers upward to birds, tree- and mountain-tops which are present but beyond. These detached but companionable phenomena have a non-human language of self-existence (whether or not directly articulated). But for the time being they communicate nothing except a quiet which it is the poet's task to absorb. 

We must remember, of course, that the title of this poem is Wanderers Nachtlied. The sun has gone down and the solitary traveller sings, albeit silently to himself in response to and within the environment of a charmed natural repose. 

Poetry, in my experience, is a continual singing in the dark. It is an almost entirely mental action in which the noise of daily language is sequestered and inaudibly refined. This takes place in the night-environment of the intelligence, enclosed as this is in an unlit physiological reclusion. Just as a dream, however stormy, enacts its business in darkness and privacy, so the poem comes into being from a shadowy chamber of which the author is the sole inhabitant. And he himself may be a stranger there - hovering over what he can perceive only vaguely and whose true nature is largely obscure. The deeper the obscurity the more profoundly he must sink to retrieve whatever matter is secreted there. 

Sometimes he will emerge with nothing. On other occasions with a deranged nonsense of the kind that makes all of us, at least now and again, jackasses. But with the assistance of some craft to which the Muse, with long practice, has apprenticed him, he will beat what he brings up into a precious and comely object. 

Too great a reliance on the effort of craft may, paradoxically, drain life from what has been engendered and it will come out stillborn. But again, given that initial receptivity to which Goethe alludes, held in equipoise with a determined application of art which remains humble in the presence of the Muses, the wholesome and well-nourished child of genius will have scope to be born in the perfection of its originality. But without these two elements, at once conspiring and in methodical variance, it will emerge a thin and undernourished thing of persiflage and superficiality.

*

Given infinite leisure, would one choose to read everything? All matter can, given a creative idiosyncrasy, be put to use. But could such a synthesis be achieved on a promiscuous diet of newspapers, journals and sensational, Romantick novels? Anything is possible. But given a brief lifetime filled with responsibilities that tear one continually in several directions, in which leisure for reading is limited, I would be hard put to choose Mrs Radcliffe over Dante and Goethe or the Gentleman's Magazine (and even The Rambler) over Shakespeare and Virgil.  Such a snobbery of the intellect may cut one off from sources of pleasure and satisfying chat. But poets, if they mean to achieve anything more significant than a versification of the commonplace, must - if they are to rise beyond the language of the parlour anecdote - seek the companionship of genius. 

*

Not to quibble with respect to its topology, let me dwell briefly on that notion of genius and the phenomenon - indeed spiritual topography - of its origin. What the Greeks explained in their metaphorical stories, was that Genius lay in a position of uncertain transition that hovered between natural objects and realms of the supernatural. The bodies of all living beings were palpably born into a gross materiality and in this respect a human body was no different from that of a goat or sheep. Goats, sheep and humans nonetheless belonged also to a sort of natural order that was charged with mystery and invisible numenous powers. 

Spirits, in parallel, inhabited the rocks and streams. And there were, beyond the experience of ordinary humans, higher orders of a divine presence in spheres that were inaccessible and dangerous, the power of whose beauty engendered dread, drove some mad and inspired others - the initiate - to participate in those sacred and prolific terrors whose daemons could equally create and destroy. Cloud-capped mountains, vertiginous and steaming chasms, the stormy, winter-black Aegean, remote dew ponds deep in rock-ridged hidden enclaves where crystalline rivulets fed meadows whispering with flowering plants, the amorous resort of half-seen beings where goatherds who had strayed too far might dream they had encountered some impossible incarnation of a beauty more desirable than that which is given in a mortal life-span: such was the resort of solitary, and no doubt, half-deranged seekers after inspiration.[2] 

In such reserved localities dwelled Mnemosyne's Daughters. And in that place where their mother had received the golden flood with which the Great Father had infused her womb, they presided in play at the Fountain of Pieria. These were the Muses without whose participation the human mind would otherwise have been condemned to dwell for ever on the flat plains of banality and the prosaic.

The supplicant or devotee who struggled through a wilderness of rock, alone, to this fastness, was granted, as a prize for his exertion, draughts of holy, goddess-suffused water: and only he it was imbibed the genial spirit whose efflorescence had arisen from a previous, divine impregnation. 

Once having drowned his brain in Hippocrene, the poet must return to his commonplace home and to a marriage he had submitted to between the quotidian and the eternal, between the drudgery of bread-winning and the infinitude whose messenger he had become. Thenceforth every tissue of the poet's body was irradiated with that confluence of earth and the divinities that pervade it. This both tore him and healed. He had drunk very deep. And these draughts both heated him and cooled; they coursed in his intelligence with intoxicating bursts of colour, music, rainbow light and a divine (albeit sometimes atheistic!) philosophy. [3]

*

Reverting to Culbone Wood and the birds to which I stood listening. It is as though they lived in Virgil and had fluttered directly from the Aeneid.  These are the lines (among the most perfect in literature) those creatures enacted:

Night.   Fatigue. The forest. Ocean. The stars setting. Quiet meadows empty.

Animals and birds in wide rough country sleep in the silence.

*

A pear tree overhangs the churchyard with a crop of late fruit encased in hard, russet-coloured skin. In the grass between graves, are rinds of two or three which have been eaten almost entirely away. One skin resembles a Viking long-boat, eviscerated and on its side. Another is a tattered web of indentations surrounding a pattern of holes, giving it the appearance - with the grass darkly showing through - of a mask, multiply fissured, that gazes back into the tree. 

*

Metal and wood sound out, first in sequence, and then together as the churchyard gate closes. This is an expression of something that I could not at once identify. Then I was overtaken by an auditory recollection: that of the clatter of military equipment: muskets, cannon, gun carriages, wagons... Milton in Book I curses iron: its discovery and excavation. And a tree - which was both dangerous and sacred - stands at the centre of his poem. Both firearms and this little gate express each in convergence.

A narrative which occurred to me as I passed through that gate and which I have thought to develop: 

Once Paradise was ended, a poor woodsman was passing through the forest and came to rest at the Tree of Knowledge which had, since in its primal state, grown into a giant which dwarfed all the trees that competed in its neighbourhood. 

Having rested in its shelter and hearkened to the song birds that innocently expressed themselves in its lofty branches, the man took his axe and belaboured the tree trunk. As the axe's edge bit through the final inch of heart-wood, the tree fell down with a thunderous crashing. Crushed by his great victim and still innocent of its identity, the woodsman died there in an agony of regret for all the great war engines that might have been fashioned from its timber.

*

The stream that runs down through the woods to Culbone changes its tonality according to your position vis-a-vis its current. I have just rounded a bend and walked up ten paces and it sounds two or three tones lower than it appeared at ground level. 

Is it the stream that plays these changes or its environment which transposes them? Or is this my ear tuning itself to an irregularity which does not exist in nature but from which the mind creates its idiosyncratic music?

*

Now, at the farm, there is a silence so complete that the sole sounds I detect are clucks and hisses emanating from my midriff, while deep in my brain, from fatigue and confusion, a symphonic roaring comes - as though Haydn stood pounding here with his Paukenwirfel - or Beethoven belaboured his infernal anvil - and the joyous palaver of Signor Rossini broke forth in nightingale roulades and lark song - all these interwoven in an instrumental complication!

Encompassing this uproar, a primordial quiet leads me to an apprehension of the moments that preceded the world's first minutes - for as God proceeded through the creation, its augmentative expression was certainly a huge commotion. 

Before this, in Chaos (that miasma of elemental interfusions), no entity existed to strike on another. But with light and order, animation and then separation (this was Elohim's means of completing and defining solid figures) came a wonderful clamour. 

'Let there be Noise!' I conjecture the Creator crying as he sank back to his sabbath: and so things and creatures rushed out from him, and like children released from the asphyxiation of a school room and who race off to play by a cold stream in the meadow, there was elemental and spontaneous uproar!

*

I, too, am a fruit of that tree onto which mankind was grafted. Once when I was a younker, I held my ear to some apple bark and heard the coursing of the sap which later in the season would inform a hundred ruddy and delicious fruit that sang all summer as they swelled on the branches.

All things are endowed, in variable degrees, with singing voices. Not everyone attends to these; nor do all phenomena reveal an acoustic property. I cannot, for example, hear this table over which I scratch (as chanticleer does to pick grubs from the dung pile). But my hand, foot and leg have tunes which are borrowed from the world's stuff we are part of and these I have eavesdropped on. Far-off and in low register, these are sotto voce melodies, not unlike those of a distant cello. 

*

Books, par excellence, are compendiums of music - Milton most especially and more conspicuously than Shakespeare. For while the latter is our greatest writer, we think of him less as the author of books than as the creator of a world, and the music of this is too various to be encapsulated or defined. 

Milton on the other hand is our greatest musical composer: and in that he studiously wrote books, these are scored in patterns which are as intricately assembled as in any Messiah. From the massiest vocalic diapason to the most hushed susurration of stringed instruments or the headiest and sweetest, most attenuated syllables of flutes and oboes. (Not to discount the harp's watery arpeggiation or the craggy and apocalyptic pyrotechnics of the trumpet!)

But (to step back from too lengthy a digression) my hand lies just now on this volume of Purchas who assembled the forces of a gigantic and stupendous choir, a veritable Babel in which voices recovered from distant, excavated millennia speak altogether in the continuity of our collective historical present: while all geographies are also here congregated in this simultaneity on which everything and everywhere converges: time and place collapsed together in a Miltonic pandaemonium (Milton himself resorted to this near contemporary pilgrimage of universals: i.e. he read Purchas). And all this contained within one leather-encased millennium of foolscap pages.

*

This complete idleness is prerequisite to creation. We are opposite to God who laboured for six days (whatever such quantities of Ur-time may have connoted) and then rested. But God's sabbatical had no conclusion. Since the final minute of day six, he has done nothing. Having set the universe in motion, God has been idle. Invisible, withdrawn, inert, he no doubt sleepily observes history, but does nothing to subvert what free will devises. Far from existing in his image, we flounder to re-enact what God was before this. The Almighty may rest. By contrast, we labour to fulfil our little histories within mortal limits. 

*

Ah: to be local and to know each of these trees! To be in possession of hands that have been brought up in the touch of some quite limited environment: that is to say, for example, particular varieties of fruit tree which are adapted to the soil and air of one circumscribed region of a single neighbourhood of the county.

I hear two owls calling to each other along the coomb: and that is one pleasure. But to be familiar with their nesting places and to follow their idiosyncratic hallooes from tree to tree with whose histories I am acquainted: that would constitute a true kind of knowledge, and with that knowledge, satisfaction. (If I had that satisfaction, how cognizant of it, without the distance predicated by reflection, might I, in fact, be?)

*

These sheep farmers are not just good people: they are in possession of and actively pursue the complete life, which consists of the following harmonious factors:

first they live in peace at the centre of a benign and productive country; second, they self-sufficiently subsist on the fruits of their work; third, those factors conduce to easy and knowledgeable relations with a natural world which is present at all moments; fourthly, they must co-operate both with each other within families and with hired labour, but equally with neighbouring farmers, the mercantile world and at least nominally the political authorities (the magistracy, coast guard, military etc. - however antipathetic: for co-operation does not imply acquiescence: even opposition infers relationship). Next they display local knowledge of the kind which is less difficult to acquire than in larger communities. This local knowledge is natural historical: as to the flowers, animals and birds of the region; and expressive of this possession is a neighbourhood dialect with its particularities of nomenclature and folkloric taxonomies.   Of equivalent import comes a long knowledge of the society in this area, family histories inwoven with observation and memory of the maintenance of land and buildings, the character of woodland management, what new trees are planted and the disposition and the distribution of the old in their fellings, reducation to charcoal etc. These, I say, are therefore good, whole people. Albeit in potential. Of morality I can say nothing.

*

At every gust of wind, a thin curtain of leaves falls as though participating in a ceremony. Rites of death made beautiful. At peace. Because expressive of a cycle which has its own very inherent drive.

*

At the river at Linmouth. Water courses purposefully and with urgency through constrictions in the rocks. At the moment following its debouchement, it wanders this and that way in distracted circles as though bewildered by arrival, and once having made its effort, without motive.

*

This, on coming to a river, was my phantasy:

'Well: here,' say I, 'is a river. I will follow it backward, right to its source. And there embrace the nymph who presides virginally at its origin.'

*

This wet, dense, tangled and yet penetrable foliage is the Xanadu into which I have plunged my intellectual and my lower person and I am half lost, half enchanted. That which is spiritual is self-estranging. It may in good part also have its element of the erotic. Men are forever ready for an experience of the sexual. This may lead to joy or conduce to disaster. Alternatively, it may be transmuted into poetry.

*

The faculty of smell: sensuality in suspension. The parenthetical drift that lies between inchoate memory and present function.

*

Oak, beech, alder, hornbeam, rowan. All express themselves in their singular and perfected language. While to me they speak peace, towards each other there is enmity and contention. For none recognises an arborial alternative to their own species of perfection.

*

The waterfall at Watersmeet: vertiginous is-ness drawing me to its endogeny. Not a death wish but a yearning for the sublime climax.

*

Oak, moss, bilberry and heather conspiring to subsist together on this inhospitable hillside. These woods heal by thus instructing.

*

Very green the moss on river rocks and tormentingly persistent the compulsive current that surrounds them. The intransigence of water. The slow, stationary growth that provides so little check that one suspects a numbness to it.

*

Low afternoon sun on the ridge above the river and blue plumes of smoke drift from cottage chimneys through the oaks and beeches. The smoke rises from sticks that have been gathered in this same woodland. It floats through branches that grew in their place and which will follow before long into the fireplace and thence as smoke through the foliage of their descendents.

*

I have sat here in the parlour idly an hour following supper. And alone with the fire that indistinctly clicks and tinkles to the left of my chair, I became possessed, and none too pleasantly, with an intuition of the presence of another in the highbacked chair that had been pushed, since last I sat here, into the remotest shadows of the room. 

When I gazed through the half light, I could make out a figure of my stature and my build. The hair (washed and brushed) was dark as mine is, while the face resembled mine in both complexion and in contour. What startled me, too, was that this person who uncannily resembled me was dressed not as I now in my white rustic smock but in the garments I had worn on my arrival at the farm: the difference being that the britches I had ruined with my incontinent evacuations were fresh, as though laundered and reconstituted, while the coat, which had been torn by brambles and squeezed from shape by exercise in sun and rain, was methodically mended. 

The brisk appearance of this second person sorted ill, however, with his posture. This was languorous but awake; at ease and yet attentive: and as I stretched my head forward to catch a better view, he responded with companionable acknowledgement: a courtesy I found heartening and yet eerie and disturbing.

I looked down and away, then through the window to the edges of the coomb over which I could descry in dusky outline a few of the sheep that had been driven that afternoon from the farmyard. Retracting my gaze, I surveyed the room and enumerated the objects which had become familiar to me. The wood pile; the poker, tongs and brushes; the table where I had sat with my papers; the Bible in its jacket of hardy Devonshire neat's leather. The homeliness of this environment offered solace. When finally I looked back towards the corner where I had perceived that languid but robust figure, there he still was: seated in the contemplative idleness I had taught myself to practise without too much impatience, and smiling with apparent rapture into the twilight. 

As though waiting for me to act, to address him, to introduce myself, to sing, recite poetry, to remark on the weather, on my farmhouse supper or the state of the rural economy, I sat frozen and incapable. And yet on the other hand, he waited - it became clear to me - for nothing at all. Here, in this being, was a self-containment so absolute and so contentedly complete that my own uncertain presence (the vacillation of my attention, divided as it had become between a fixation on what I had begun to perceive as an adaptation of my own presence and my 'own', or other preoccupations) was of no consequence to him at all. 

Privacy and absorption radiated from this person or image. And as the initial shaking I had experienced dropped in intensity to an approximate synchrony with the beating of my heart and the stark horripilations of my scalp and forearms layered themselves back into the skin, my fright was translated to a quieter feeling. Unburdened, finally, of the embarrassment of delusion, I too now sat at ease in silent companionship, as though contracted in an esteem that this Doppelganger (as I identified it now) evoked. 

For here, while the vision lasted, I confidently now knew, was a better-developed self, a self-integrated soul who sought nothing further than the tranquillity that the evening offered, and who responded to the time with a benign repose which was at odds, and sharply, with the nervous dissatisfaction that my own constant and restless fidgeting beginnings had evinced by the minute through that evening.

But how was it, I wondered, that I should find myself represented by this two-entity person: here, just now and not in the past when I have before both suffered and enjoyed so various an experience of life in its psychic and supernatural character?

I observe in retrospect that it was I, in whose self-invisible identity I then dwelt, who looked out upon him, and not he (as subjectively I might have experienced that other as myself) who gazed back at me, who was the agent of cognition and of seeing and who recorded the occurrence. 

He clearly saw me and no doubt registered impressions or an opinion. But whereas I controlled the faculties of sensation and of thought which I can still recollect, what he may have seen remains - if this existed - wholly inaccessible.

This better-man-than-I stays therefore a phantasm. Nonetheless, I have gained. Albeit uncanny, the experience was to become both not unpleasing and, in the following way, instructive. For I have learned this thing: that the condition of being bound as a single entity to one place and body, is not, as I before assumed - absolute. What the imagination allows us (volitionally or not) if we cultivate the possibility, is an apparently reliable experience of self-separation without this effecting a disintegration of the faculties.

This is important in so far as I am morally responsible for being here and not in Xanadu or even in Weimar! I am, afterall, an Englishman with a family and other social accountabilities. My Sehnsucht for otherness of landscape and climate is a condition of the imagination which must be left to create whatever worlds of 'one entire and perfect chrysolite' it may contrive in parallel to the muddy confusion of a Somersetshire present. I must be content with this doubleness and enjoy, to their full, the abstractions which are made possible by what might be described as a spiritualisation of a reserved mental existence. 

One further thought. The figure I observed enjoyed the elegant self-possession of a gentleman; a fellow who had been schooled and who might pass for a churchman, a scholar, a member of some learned profession; one for whom self-doubt (if he should entertain such) might effortlessly be subordinated to the diversion of what interested his mind. 

Note, however, that I who thus observed, was dressed in a farmer's smock, and that to him who observed me, I was no doubt a simple fellow whose accomplishments extended to the management of sheep. Here I was, therefore, a cartoon (as Gilray might have reduced my double character) of self-assured gentleman and displaced shepherd. 

And here too was a simple truth which every poet before me must have encountered: that the practice of poesy implies both the development of what (for better or worse) we may call a cultivated intellect (any individual may achieve this). And also the simplicity of the shepherd, who has nothing to do but gape at landscape, watch his woolly charges, speak with authority to his dog and, not least (as he blows his nail) sing. Heaven bless that musician. If there is something we may not learn from him, it may not be worth knowing. May God take me closer to that condition and let this smock grow hourly closer to my gentlemanly habit!

*

In the peace engendered or inspired by this vision of two better selves, I slept. And so, no doubt, my Doppelganger left. But here's the curiosity. For during this sleep I dreamed a quasi-repetition of my poem, enacted in a new idiom, not under the influence of an opiate, but on the contrary, as though it had wandered through the drunken memory of a peasant and transmitted with the rude vigour of a Somerset pot-house ballad. 

Yea. I stood, in my dream, at the counter of an inn (translated strangely from one where I had passed an hour on my journey hither), my elbow sleeve soaking up the cider from its surface, when suddenly an old father, so heavily grey-bearded that his face had become all but indistinguishable from the sheep that were his livelihood, struck the stone flags with his crook and piped up in a snarling monotone with what initially appeared to be a ballad of the neighbourhood. 

The company went quiet, although not entirely, and thus the stanzas, struggling from his whiskers in the all but opaque dialect of the region, emerged to the mutter of fellow drinkers and the clatter of their cups as they raised them and let them fall.

And this, to my astonishment, was the ballad with which the old shepherd addressed his companions. It was a refraction, a reconstitution, and indeed perhaps a satirical parody of my own unpublished poem, so lately composed that the ink was scarcely set on the page and the dust and crusts were not yet fallen from its blottings and erasures. And here, in rugged, stumbling iambs and in still more ragged dactyls, as though caught like greasy sheep's wool in a thorn hedge, was an ale house song, which was set to a tune - I laughed in amazement - on which generally was carried the commonest bawdry: those excrements of poetry that drop from the mouths - although more likely from their nether regions - of drunken clowns and country yokels:

Alas! as I transcribed the song I was summoned off on business. I recall nothing further. 

*

Another dream. That I was travelling, perhaps with Marco Polo or Friar Rubeck, in the wastes of Asia, and passing through the terrible and spirit haunted Taklamakan desert:

Towards early evening, we descried a low hill to the west and our horses having smelled water thereabouts and weary as they had become on the scantily grassed plain over which we had laboured since first light, picked up the canter into which I had all day, unsuccessfully attempted to urge them. 

Before long, I too drank in the soft, moist wind, and as the sun began to sink behind its north-western shoulder, we saw firelight, then figures moving slowly between the outlines of a stand of trees which stood presumably at the margin of the oasis which we were now fast approaching.

Anxious to gain camp before the sun set entirely, I urged our leading horses into a gallop, which painfully and bravely they contrived for a scant furlong. This, however, proved sufficient. And just as the final rays of sunlight withdrew across the plain, we achieved the oasis and the scent of water was turned to gratifying actuality. How, otherwise, we would have survived the night I hesitate to conjecture. But now horses and men, both, lowered their heads into the dark, warm, brackish marsh water. And while our beasts snorted between draughts of this all too savoury liquor, we lay down near them on our bellies, and then on our backs, satisfied but entirely disgusted, spitting up the after-flavour and finally indulging our worn-out bodies with their first moments - after three days' unbroken travel - of inaction.

*

From open silence of the upland into the enclosed hush of a stand of birches - their foliage bright yellow - through which the stream courses with a secretive continuity. 

The Grove of Nemi: where the priest-king stalks with drawn sword round the tree whose branch, with its gold leaves, gleams and rattles.

An insane combat for the priesthood ensues. The poet enters and joins the struggle. He cries out in sublime hexameters and perishes.  

*

The path narrows to a thread between the brambles, ferns and rowan saplings. In places it is wholly taken over by a new, fresh moss. I sit down to rest and listen the unidentifiable mewings and cluckings of solitary birds - as though they too had wandered confused into this green and brown darkness and were expiring for light. 

An upturned tree where its roots have snapped off short: the base stuffed almost entirely with a rubble of shaley fragments and dead leaves, not its own, that have filtered down on the wreckage. How consoling, when I reach into my pocket for a quill to describe this, to find a branch of fern that has somehow become stuck there.

*

Rocks and tree have achieved their perfected condition. The horse and the stag likewise. The question, in comparison, that mankind raises may not so easily be answered. 

*

Objectively speaking, one may be subject to the registration of an insult or be the victim of neglect or scorn. But one might also achieve a condition in which these are not subjectively experienced: but instead viewed as the expression of the psychological apparatus that binds envy or hatred to some object it must feed on in order, itself, to survive. Those in active and complete possession of this insight enjoy a freedom that others less fortunate (I include my poor self here) achieve only at the point of death.   Extinction is of course the great freedom. To be disencumbered of one's self is the sublime liberation.

*

The odour of wood smoke: domesticity, seclusion, the comfort, of an evening, of a fireside supper; then sleep by the hearth in an environment of familiar people and objects.   All this I divine vaguely as I pass a row of little houses whose inhabitants are invisible to me. And yet what secret miseries may be concealed here.

*

A fine working dog, properly fed and trained to the working or recreational society of man, is an extension and even an expression of our happiness. Racing intelligently and with apparent joy among the flock along the coomb, the sheep dog is a veritable embodiment of the orderly deployment of useful energy. How we strain to reward our dogs adequately with an acknowledgement of our appreciation! But we can never truly know the extent to which we communicate with them. 

Walking home last evening surrounded at knee height by a foaming tide of ewes and yearlings, I was moved mostly by the restless and officious discipline of our two canine lieutenants that coursed among their charges, now circling and interweaving with them, now running back to chivvy forward a straggler, now leaping vertically with a strict authoritative yelp, now standing guard with one flank while its partner came rhythmically into view with a secondary stream that fed the main current: all this achieved with indefatigable verve at a whistle or a short word from the presiding shepherd. And what is their reward? There is none at all. Given a good home, they would eat and exercise whether or not they herded sheep. No. Their joy is in their work, which they accomplish for its own sake. 

I will not say that this must be the case with poetry. What I know, however, is that the world - the poet's universal master - will not pat my head, still less scratch behind my ear for my efforts. Nor will it feed me. Shall I, nonetheless, still laugh and fetch for it - from the spring of the Muses?

*

To arrive at Xanadu one must travel through a great deal of very chilly mud or hot and stony desert. Then on arrival one finds that it is a paradise presided over by a tyrant. Was this (latter, east of Eden) our First Parents' experience?

*

I have come to here to indulge myself in the impersonal life of imagination. A pursuit which I hope is not invalidated by the gratification I derive from the exercise.

*

In pursuit of poetic truth, one may create a monster of oneself to achieve even an approximation of what one might have intended. The nature of that monster lies in its composite identity, the parts of which are disparate and sometimes grotesquely incongruous. The celebrated biform, for example, that was the issue of Pasiphae's infatuation with a bull and which became the presiding spirit of the labyrinth. A writer's own labyrinthine person contains several of such bizarre manifestations. They are accretions of the diverse energies that adapt to one another in the twilight of his interior and of whose confluence he is often (most likely) unaware. I have seen a model of Cellini's Perseus whose hand is plunged in that thick bed of snakes which crowns the Medusa. Perseus exerts a muscular, determined grasp. But unlike him, we can neither deracinate nor exterminate that interfusion of mental vipers. This is because they have nested in our brains, where (having once hatched in the nourishing and warm heart's egg) they have grown upward. Palpable, perhaps, but indiscernible without some burnished and externalising mirror.

*

There is too much poetry and music. But it is important that each generation maintains its presence. This is a motive for our participation in one or other of the arts. How far we succeed or produce anything of worth that posterity will cherish is another question. And while most of us attempt only the lower slopes of Parnassus (for if we are not modest we are easily fatigued), it is imperative that we strive ad altiora.  Given that we are, at the best, with our limited talents, a competitive fraternity, it is surprising perhaps that there are not more great poets. For it is no doubt possible for a writer of even moderate ability - given time, application and a degree of inspirational good fortune - to surpass himself. 

I suspect, on the other hand, that there exists within the working of destiny a law that determines a limit on apotheosis. Take the last two centuries only. We resort to Donne, Milton and Pope for the exceptional rarity of their genius. What if good writers such as Crashaw, Prior, Rochester and Thompson had attained comparable heights? How crowded would our empyrean have become. We could scarcely breathe for the proliferation of genius!

*

To produce even moderately good poetry should lie within the nature of friendly commerce. It is a wholesome act to proffer to one's friend, to a bookseller and eventually to the public, the produce of one's labour. I learned something of this when I was coming through ----- and stopped in the market to buy lettuce and radishes. It was a hearty transaction. The gardener's hand - that had raised this produce - trading it with amicable liberality as though to say by implication: I have made this for you (my penny appearing alien in his upturned hand)! So, I suggest, when I vounteer a sonnet, I would rather be saying 'This lettuce is what I mean. Let these radishes speak for me.'

*

Do I relish the melancholy in which, for the most part, I dwell when I am not writing - when every breath might, if I passed it with greater articulation across the larynx, become an inconsolable sigh? Why is this condition not unpleasant? 

First, because it represents an enclosure in which I am, as it were, fortified or defended in a condition which has an identity so complete that I may define it with the large, firm brush strokes of a studio painter. Here, in contradistinction to the nebulosity of common experience, in which one senses neither this nor that particular affect, one may claim fraternal relations with darkness - and while this experience may have a flattened or depressing character, its very unified monumentality provides a security in what otherwise has become mere flux or dissipation. 

Imagine, for example, turning the pages of Tristram Shandy (that great masterpiece) and viewing casually the sentences and (not least) the felicitous Tom foolery of the punctuation markings, which resemble the brush strokes in that same artist's sketchbook: from that maelstrom of indications and significations one arrives at Chapter *** with the great black slab of ink stone that marks good old Corporal Trim's peroration. How finally secure that moment of arrival at the great blackness and its blankness! But idly turn the pages further and then witness the continuance of inconsequentiality: the pallid fervour of existence's prattle which drivels so entertainingly apace, just as, in parallel, our lives pitter patter forward! How much better to be rooted in those petrified black marshes than live within the perforated shade of this or that quiddity or the life-sentence of a loquacious quibble!

*

The poet and the farmer, who co-exist within a separate but parallel irresolution. When to plough, when sow and harvest? When take up your pen? When judge it is time to clear it from the table to make way for the soup pot? 

What is it they share, but an urge to create and to propagate that which will nourish? Both lose themselves in work which, because it is essential to their living and in some degree to that of others, they do not stop to question. While the farmer will lie in a grave which rises somewhere in the neighbourhood of the furrow he has lately ploughed, the poet will be interred between lines within which gapes the abyss of what has been unsaid. He has lived, already, conscious of it or not, with the presence of that want. While the writer's posterity lies in a mute scattering of written characters, the farmer's children joyfully heap ripe wheat against their winters.

*

Just as the lark rises from sullen earth and must return to it, having inscribed its song (for a while) upon the abstraction of a formless heaven, so the melancholy ground we inhabit is the anti-muse from which we make our often lame or broken-winged ascents and which magnetically draws us back, having achieved its purpose in inspiring us into opposition to it.

*

In the conversation between the poet and the world, a metaphoric bridge of significations composed of often mutually discordant elements is extended. Not one single truth may be observed to make its crossing here but it is obscured and rendered inscrutable by the very medium that made its going over possible.

Little that is said or written down pertains to the meaning which had its origin at the moment of its conception. We experience only the artefacture of the means by which a transit has been created. Herein lies a connection between two points: the first which stands before the moment of articulation, the second that follows it - and it is said, done or written. 

In the meantime, what we witness is an indecipherable music as if produced by a gorgeous but indistinctly apprehended exotic being, whose beauty consists of falsifications raised to the level of an exquisitely construed phantasm. Important here to remember that Ariel must, after that relatively brief service to the tyrant who rescued and then enslaved him, have his freedom.

Thenceforth he will sing wherever he chooses and for the most part beyond our hearing. Caliban, who adored this music, will forever roam the island in silence. And we, poor creatures, must amble beside him scratching our heads in an equal quandary.

*

To descant on the outlines of a second landscape, the medium was made ready: a small hot house or propagation chamber where bacilli of acute amoebiosis met the counter current of an opiated posset.

*

Considering again the Gorgon's head Cellini modelled. I would say that when a sculptor cuts stone away from the form he wishes to reveal, that by the same token he builds into it the importance of his conception and that this is what becomes expressed. All beauty emerges from some unidentifiable, buried and opaque essence and what we see on the surface is informed by an interior modelling without which the surface is liable to slip off, revealing nothing. The form achieved thus arrives from two interiors: 1. that of stone and 2. the sculptor's imagination.  Thus it is that what gets made - be it sculpture or poetry - comes alive from behind. And those who contemplate it from the outside are animated in harmony with both the projected and discovered interior. Such a work then finds its place within the viewer's inner person.

*

In the process of composition: the illusion of addressing the world. 

At the moment of publication: the reality of sinking into obscurity.

*

With reference to what one has published - the notices one may have received - the circle one inhabits - the number of copies of a book that have circulated - the antecedents and contemporaries with whom one has made a connection - such are the questions preoccupying those for whom literary life is a means of affiliation or advancement. 

What happens in a poem or an essay or a novel and the manner in which it is written retain significance only in so far as these relate to the age, what a critic has written about them, how far the work has been distributed and what developments may be expected from it. Who, further, will be in receipt of that writer's next submission of work? What great emolument might it command and how far will that fee compare to what he has received before and the amount that others may get from the same literary houses? 

All this may be of historical interest. But the histories of such affairs are become a substitute for the experience from which writing emerges and by degrees it overtakes literature as a great cloud descends across the detail of what one has been observing in the sunlight. And therefore, given all such factors that are peripheral to creative life and on account of economic, biographical and anecdotal preoccupations that attach to any work's appearance, it progressively grows more difficult to separate these phenomena from the realm of experience through which a writer's imagination leads us.

In this way, it becomes the event and the phenomenon of publication itself that push themselves into the foreground of a literary culture, while the nature of literature - its quintessential matter and the manner of its expression - lose what integrity they may have enjoyed before the character of a book evolved from having spiritual and aesthetic value, into a question of its standing in the world as a public occurrence.

A writer who gets caught up in such preoccupations loses control of the experiences which inspire his work and he becomes a 'literary figure'. Such a position is a phenomenon of the present age and its dangers are not difficult to see as - for example - a successful writer's mode of expression becomes embedded in an ever quickening production of what his public has in mind for him. 

A first lesson to draw from this is that the writer must above all things become detached from the expectation of an effect. If an audience is believed to exist, let it first be among the angels. Only in solitude and obscurity may questions of importance that will outlast him present themselves: for a mind that remains disengaged from ambition and thus receptive because undistracted by the thing which success renders that which had previously been alive, is for ever fresh and will perform its gymnastic imaginative undertakings with spontaneity. 

Success, for any such person, becomes a misfortune whose illusory glamour reveals itself generally too late. To retreat (for one who has tasted fame) generates bitterness where otherwise it might have constituted the occasion for an advance towards further original composition. Better not write than to be the toy of fashion. And best not to read if the effect of that pastime is to encourage in the future work of a writer the equivalent of a new top hat or bonnet.

*

She is half way up a ladder and enfolded in the fruiting stems and branches of an apple tree. Her basket hangs on a pruned stub at the level of her waist and she is picking from the clusters that surround her body when - as she turns to pass some down - through the orchard strolls a sturdy younker - he is five feet tall and no older than twenty - and reaching a hand up to her smocked arse sticking from the ladder, he slaps it roundly: his cupped palm ringing on it with a sharp, fleshy echo. 

Now he runs on, and on he runs,

And runs while she stands mute,

She whose pale skin I had viewed last night

Blushes crimson as the cider fruit. 

She plucks amain and on she plucks,

To fill her creel today.

And as she plucks, she blushes red

And she sings a wedding lay:

As I was walking by the meer

A ferlie I did spy.

And a faery man did bid me go

To be his lemman - 'twas no deny.

Ah no, Sir, cried I, I can not follow thee,

For my true love lives here on the earth so firm.

If I left him and journied to faery land

He would come to sore, sore harm.

Nay pretty maid, ye shall come away with me

And kiss this red ring in my hand.

And if you oblige - 'tis no great thing -

I will make thee the Queen of all Elfland.

Ah no, Sir, I cried, I'm simple, simple girl,

Never fit to be Queen of all Elfland.

And so I ran home to my bonny lemman,

And I gave him my heart with my own bonny hand.

*

Cider making. A mounting heap of little scrumps - sunlight exposing varieties of red and yellow - vast deal of scab but those skins go in - they wash the grindstone with apple vinegar and then swab it with water. Once the old horse comes in and is harnessed to the bar, she is fed an apple at each fifth revolution - froth drools from her bit in white elastic swags and slides along the harness and so onto straw and apple leaves that mat the barn floor. A meditating, solemn, half-blind mare whose old memory guides her through each meander. Later when the last sap has been wrung, she will mumble the residue which has the consistency of sawdust. I asked the farmer:

- Did you wassail last new year?

- Ay sir, at Twelfth Night we went at it.

- And you knocked on each tree?

- Ay, give trees a whack to frighten out the imps and fairies. And that to show 'em [he meant the trees] what we'll do if they set barren.

- And you feed trees some toast with last year's cider?

- Right up in her crotch. (Laughs). That's to give her courage.

- Will you sing me your wassail?

- I know what we sang as boys when we went round the houses at Langport - there. But not all the verses. Which I have forgotten. (Sings)

There was an old man and he had an old cow
And how for to keep her he didn't know how
He built up a barn for to keep his cow warm
And a drop or two of cider will do us no harm

The girt dog of Langport he burnt his long tail
And this is the night we go singing wassail
O master and missus now we must be gone
God bless all in this house until we do come again…

- That's what I remember. When we've beaten every tree, then we howl the orchard.

*

In the remarks I have made about apple trees and cider making, I have vowed to say nothing on the subject of the Fall of Man. And yet…

*

I have been possessed these last days by a voice that I am hard put to recognise. This was in part engendered by the young woman whom I have overheard more than once singing country songs and ballads - those other-worldly lays which sit strangely in a landscape which is benign in its aspect of meadow and pasture, but which assaults, with its very precipitous points of vantage, my confidence in the stability of earth and our place on it as inhabitants. 

This - in that we cling here to land which seems always ready to topple over itself into the sea - is high country and (as a high voice can) takes one to the empyrean that encloses us like a great cone in whose broad and open end we breathe but whose apex above us reaches to the indiscernable, infinitely compacted concentration of the Great All. 

Given this sensation of subsisting on the crest of the material world, and at the broad end of what gives me life and breath but which mocks us with its high invisibility, I have found myself prone to stumble and stagger. It is not just my voice, which has become intoxicated with alternating happiness and terrors that I no longer quite recognise. My feet now function as falling away points in a landscape which subverts me to the extent that I question whether I can continue to walk entirely upright here, but should creep along for fear of either tumbling into the abyss or becoming subsumed into an aether of such terrific condensation that I would be asphyxiated with the intensity of its spiritual gases!

By contrast and in concert: a view, dangerously unstable, downward through tangled rocks and woodland to the ocean draws one giddily to the element of a restlessness expressed by those wrinkled and uncertain fathoms. Down there rush and growl the waters that have streamed from I do not know what remote continents and which will take themselves off on their Odyssean voyages, inscrutably to us, and yet telling us more, perhaps, than we would like to know of the loose-fitting surface of worlds that some day will make off with every one of our small, mundane certainties.

Given these widely separated regions in which I have been suspended, it is scarcely surprising that the voice that once arose both from my heart and from my intelligence no longer converges from these seats of affect and cognition, and I feel I am, for the time being, gone mad north by northwest, deracinated from old certainties of utterance and haunted both by tones I find myself now giving voice to and also by another that hovers and dances o'er bank and briar and cries to me, like Ariel, 'Thou liest!' And why? Because given the unhinging of the securities that I once entertained, I no longer know why I should be here on earth, what I should do now and where I shall be next, as the whirligig of time, like a wind that seems to sweep and spin me from my proper self, brings in his absolute perturbations. 

                                         *

It is not often that I resort to the Bible. But given this crisis - and not having an Aeneid where I have on occasion indulged, with light-hearted superstition, in Sortes Virgilianae - I opened the great volume that dominates the parlour: and lo! put my finger on this reanimating passage:    

Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thy habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes. For thou shalt break forth on the right hand and on the left. Isaiah 54:2

How unfortunate that the surrounding verses ('he was wounded for our transgressions', for example) have been deformed anachronistically into messianic prophecies. Let old poetry such as this reach us naked of any creed which (admittedly) gave it occasion and which religion stands only for the temporary garment of the truths that gave rise to the metaphor in which lies its compound symbolic energy! 

Yea, and though I walk through the valley of the shadow of ontological derangement, I will lengthen my cords. And indeed, break forth!

*

The prospect of winter is altogether bitter and already I hear crows' wings striking hard leaves, dead already, in the oaks and chestnuts. A hurried metallic smashing clatters from what has mantled our world since April with benign leafy softness. 

Within a few days we will have consumed our final lettuce. Relish while you can these fresh stalks with their glassy and elastic textures. I look out on the dark months and see on the horizon an infinitely stretching pile of turnip!

*

To apprehend the working of poetic imagination one must begin with the premise that the condition of quotidian experience is unsatisfactory. And in this manner. That the objects of perception and one's relationship with them exist on a level of the common sense, to wit, a shared supposition that the boundaries we perceive which appear to define the phenomena of the world do indeed hem them in, and that nothing else exists either beyond these or inside them. 

To my mind this implies a universe consisting largely of a furniture whose edges, albeit worn, are intact, and whose bulk is filled all too often with an exsufflicate and packed stuffing which proclaims a condition, merely, of inertia. All this, I might add, exists in low country. A flat plain which is either wet, miasmatic or simply colourless and without feature. Otherwise - and this is my experience - these contours are defined by valley walls which rise so close as to admit little or no light and which in themselves contribute a low, grey luminosity.

I am speaking here not at all of depressed spirits but rather of the ordinariness and limitation in which for the most part we are reasonably content to exist. To live to the full, however, and transcend the shadow I have adumbrated, some pioneering effort must be expended. I speak not merely of adventure, although that forms part of it. No. It is rather, I think, a question of belief.

I mean the faith that the light does exist and that beyond the grey and well-worn valley slope, exists a sphere in which everything is different. Even Parnassus in its lower ranges provides, after all, a dreary perambulation. But as the angle of its slope sharpens and our breathing grows more fitful, the air thins in our throat and the light pierces deep into our eye strings, with the result that as we die a little so we simultaneously come alive. In the exiguity of our near extinction, there, in fleeting moments, we may glimpse the sublime, and that alpine peak glows ever more brilliantly for our having identified and ingested a part of its radiance!

*

I am tortured, as though by a perpetual thirst, with the certain knowledge of my unameliorable ignorance.

This latter, in truth, is all I may confidently know. And yet when I learn some new thing, whatever scrap of knowledge I acquire, far from slaking the desert which has invaded my person, is displaced by the encroachment of an increased dryness.

My consolation? Montaigne's medallion, the inscription on which I must carve on my own tormented, variably humble and self-vaunting heart's flesh: 'Que sais-je?' Is it possible, perhaps, with this targe acknowledged, to keep company with the things of this world in their separation, each of which - be they kitchen utensils or philosophical systems of the most profound implication - must share some part of the ignorance which otherwise one experiences in relationship with their collectivity.

*

The confidence 1. to go on, not to fail in courage, and to express with sincerity those things that fill the mind and the heart. And 2. the modesty and courage to acknowledge the limitations of any result.

The first demands both certainty and valour: that the heart will encourage the mind to brave the minutiae of its self-doubt, even to the extent of confronting despair with its sword whetted and drawn.

The second takes us to a condition - as we sit with what we have written - of an appalled solitude. Gone is the battle in whose fervour we blazed our composition, and we are confronted in the supervening blankness with what we imagined to have been a prize.

Ah, how such spoils darken in the plainness of that after-moment! And yet in what I have called 'modesty' we must not, once again, surrender to doubt, to the conquest of which we owe the very existence of what lies now on the table. 

The silence, of which there are many complexions, in which these small and private but often mortal encounters happen, is itself frightening. I will not catalogue their entirety. But these are some:

There is the silence of self-rebuke

the silence of reproach (its near twin)

the silence of self-mockery

the silence of repudiation

the silence of indifference

the silence of weak, half-hearted approbation

the silence of entirely nothing.

I am reminded, with this last, of an inscription on the map of Tartaria by Ortelius (his folio 47). Some way between Samarcand and Caracoram lies the Desertum Lop. Ortelius marks this empty and unpainted space with SOLITUDINES VASTAE. There is consolation in reading such words in an old map book, for those slanting capitals with their exuberant interlacings, contribute to my suspicion that in my solitude I am not alone: the inanimate world shares it!

*

There is the theatrical quotidian materiality of struggle; and there is the aether of contemplation. In an intermediate place lies the workshop or the smithy in which an amalgamation of these spheres is beaten into the part-contemplative substantiality of an artefact such as a carving, a landscape painting, a musical composition, or (God save us!) a line of poetry. And in the transport or translation that occurs between these regions, lies the resolution of experience in all its sorrowful and ecstatic aspects.

Not all experience, however. For those categories of affect are too variable to define, no state is absolute in character and very little - whether in the phenomenal world or in the realm of those fluxes and reflexes that we call our thoughts and feelings - may definitively be characterised. Never have I felt more strongly the diaphanous and insubstantial motility of the external world and the kinesis of its unstable and imaginary representation as thrown, in shadow form, on the back wall of the mind - overwhelmed as this already has been by the in-flow which, since my infancy, must have been continuous. Poetry must both challenge and incorporate this inexhaustible movement of events, things, thoughts and feelings. This venture, itself, changes. And we shall for ever be busy when meditatively we are least active.

*

At a certain point in our lifetime, we are thrown abruptly on an unfamiliar shore of whose existence we had never dreamed and whose place in both local and universal geography we can not identify. 

Disoriented by the sea from which we have been driven and the land which offers no sign that we belong there, we must start life anew from the moment of our abandonment and set out to make comfortable what is threatening and create familiarity from the supervention of complete strangeness. 

There are of course, those, such as Ovid, who have been forcibly exiled and must, on account of some irrational tyranny in their place of origin, endure a dreary and unrelieved barbarism until they drop, among the goatherds, to an end which lacks the most remote consolation. 

There are others (who fare worse) whom destiny has sentenced to the most excruciating physical and mental torture. Fate and nature converge on yet others (Viola and Sebastian are examples), throwing them at random into unforeseeable contingencies from which they must save themselves through the exercise of wit, hard work and, not least, virtue. 

If it was - through no mischief of their own - a combination of the ocean and the enmity of warring states that waylaid those twins - then the vicious lords beguiled by Prospero were drawn onto his island, in part by a current to repent that lies within each person's moral physiology.  And in tune with this current - the sea responding sympathetically - Prospero bade Ariel harmonise the winds he needed.

These destinies lie unequally in parallel. But too much literary analogy would obscure the point at which (in my nakedness) I entered. Neither can I explore, satisfactorily, the notion I have here tentatively introduced, because I am, at this very moment, still cast afresh into that environment of the unfamiliar which has, of a sudden, made me a stranger to myself and to everything in my past that I recognised as belonging to me. Self, place and station, all unknown and alien. How must I again start? Only the onward movement of time, which obliterates itself as it goes, will reveal this.

Unfamiliarity must, I think, be the experience of old people: and this helps me towards a definition of the experience to which I have alluded. To view this notion from a different point of vantage, it is helpful to acknowledge that what appears, to an outside view, to be the experience of others, is by virtue of that very distance, normalising and commonplace. Thus, in the company of some older person - I have found myself thinking - it is as though such an elder is just that by definition: always has been. Furthermore, that the experience of senectitude is somehow reserved merely for others, and that we are somehow, by virtue of our juvenile subjectivity, immune from this. 

There will, however, come a moment (should one be fortunate enough to survive so long) when one is there, suddenly; and that condition of aging we had viewed with such complacency from beyond, has inalienably become ours. Such a realisation defines the new moment. And given no escape is possible, one must finally acknowledge the new sphere - which is strangerhood. 

Imagine (but truly) those first moments of Viola. She is half dead from the ship wreck. The beach curves bleakly. She does not even know that she's in enemy Illyria. Stranded in the loss of everything - home, family and fortune - the world has changed entirely. Is it any wonder that she starts up again - God ild her! - as a different person?

*

Without any such intention, I have exchanged glances with the young woman who brings me my morning porridge and have thus far learned this from her demeanour: that the mind, through the eyes, informs the heart's intentionality. What I saw in this young servant's aspect was frankness and chastity. And while this is also what I returned, I suspect that had I identified a lascivious opportunism, my own eyes would have mirrored the same. Am I just an echo? Not an unhappy character for a poet. But one that can also lead to a moral disorder.

*

How does this come to be possible: that a sense of shame attaches to our having been born into this most modern of centuries? And that in belonging to an age which is separated, as none have been before this, from those natural mysteries that were constituted within the very thews of previous social and intellectual existence, we have become inauthentic people, cut off from those inspirational sources which animated the lives of our most valued creative forebears?

I derive this sense less from an analysis of our historical status - of which I would not be capable - than from a feeling, perhaps common to the poet, that a millennium of quasi-messianic splendour has occurred already, and that today's practitioner can only flounder in the orts and wreckage of what has already been. 

I will acknowledge that a similar relationship between what is experienced as an age of lead might often have existed in a counterpoint with some visionary golden prospect - and that, for example, the poets of fifth century Athens and of Augustan Rome felt as historically fallen away from Homer as do we from those Athenians to whom we would attribute near Homeric exaltation.

Closer to our time and place, what we seem most to regret is the straightforward vigour of a Shakespearean England. And yet did Drayton, Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Campion and Daniel wake each morning and inhale, with invigorated complacence, a communally sustaining Elizabethan sunlight which shone with sovereign gold upon the quick green of a landscape from within which Albion responded - as in the exordium to Sonnet XXXIII - with reciprocal eclats of chlothic Falstaffian well-being? If so, one might enquire, what meaning can we attach to the sentiments of the pastoral, which express a nostalgia (vide As you Like it and thence back through to Theocritus) which was no doubt equal to or even stronger than is ours to theirs? An unanswerable question and I will not pursue it. 

No. But what I feel, I must, of course, live with. But should I let this kill my labour? Did Lucretius subside under the burden of Epicurean master teachings? Or Euripides wilt beneath the inheritance of the Oresteia? Nay. What I should like to imagine is that they gloried in a struggle with an attachment to what they received from the past and which fed them whatever creative tasks they had undertaken. But that, secondly, in the course of what may have been a violent engagement, they tore themselves away into something which justifiably they could call theirs and which could, incidentally, both nourish their contemporaries and even generate for them a living.

Nor is originality altogether to the purpose - there must, after all, be cases in which a masterwork derives almost entirely from some devotional mimesis (though I would be hard put to it to name one). Neither must I vaunt or derogate my own recent efforts. All I suggest now is that we should abandon our habit of shame. And howsoever we may feel disenchantment with an historical dislocation, we must pursue whatever pathway onto which destiny (or chance) has thrown us. And if not brag of our position there, accept our status as being merely the latest in that sequence of what is modern into which all beings, whether or not they like it, have been born since a long time before Homer! All beings - if not all phenomena - are perennially modern.