blessings on your twentieth year
with Meg; but let this, in the meantime, be for
our older link through places and your poems.
Declensions
Snow on the tops: half the day I’ve sat at the window
staring at fells made suddenly remote
by whiteness that disguises them as high mountains
reared behind the bracken-covered slopes
of others whose colour yesterday was theirs.
In the middle distance, half-stripped trees
have shed pink stains on the grass beneath them.
That other pinkness over Windermere
is the setting sun through cloud. And in the foreground
birds act out their various natures
around the food I’ve set on the terrace wall:
the plump chaffinch eats on steadily
even in a hail-shower; tits return when it’s over
to swing on their bacon-rind; a dunnock hops
picking stray seeds; and the territorial robin,
brisk, beady-eyed, sees them all off.
I am not at all sure that this is the real world
but I am looking at it very closely.
Is landscape serious? Are birds? But they are fading
in dusk, in the crawling darkness. Enough.
Knowing no way to record what is famous
precisely for being unrecordable,
I draw the curtains and settle to my book:
Dr William Smith’s First Greek Course ,
Exercise Fourteen: third declension nouns.
My letters, awkward from years of non-use,
sprinkle over the page like birds’ footprints,
quaint thorny symbols, pecked with accents:
as I turn the antique model sentences:
The vines are praised by the husbandmen.
The citizens delight in strife and faction.
The harbour has a difficult entrance.
Weathering
Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face
catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes
with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:
that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young for ever, to pass.
I was never a Pre-Raphaelite beauty,
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,
happy is how I look, and that’s all.
My hair will turn grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,
and the years work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather-beaten as well
that’s little enough lost, a fair bargain
for a year among lakes and fells, when simply
to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion.
Going out from Ambleside
1
He is lying on his back watching a kestrel,
his head on the turf, hands under his neck,
warm air washing over his face,
and the sky clear blue where the kestrel hovers.
A person comes with a thermometer.
He watches a ceiling for three minutes.
The person leaves. He watches the kestrel again
his head pressed back among the harebells.
2
Today he will go over to Langdale.
He springs lightly in his seven-league boots
around the side of Loughrigg
bouncing from rock to rock in the water-courses
evading slithery clumps of weed, skipping
like a sheep among the rushes
coursing along the curved path upward
through bracken, over turf to a knoll
and across it, around and on again
higher and higher, glowing with exaltation
up to where it all opens out.
That was easy. And it was just the beginning.
3
They bring him tea or soup.
He does not notice it. He is busy
identifying fungi in Skelghyll Wood,
comparing them with the pictures in his mind:
Purple Blewit, Yellow Prickle Fungus,
Puffball, Russula, two kinds of Boletus –
the right weather for them.
And what are these little pearly knobs
pressing up among the leaf-mould?
He treads carefully over damp grass,
patches of brilliant moss, pine-needles,
hoping for a Fly Agaric.
Scarlet catches his eye. But it was only
reddening leaves on a bramble.
And here’s bracken, fully
with Meg; but let this, in the meantime, be for
our older link through places and your poems.
Declensions
Snow on the tops: half the day I’ve sat at the window
staring at fells made suddenly remote
by whiteness that disguises them as high mountains
reared behind the bracken-covered slopes
of others whose colour yesterday was theirs.
In the middle distance, half-stripped trees
have shed pink stains on the grass beneath them.
That other pinkness over Windermere
is the setting sun through cloud. And in the foreground
birds act out their various natures
around the food I’ve set on the terrace wall:
the plump chaffinch eats on steadily
even in a hail-shower; tits return when it’s over
to swing on their bacon-rind; a dunnock hops
picking stray seeds; and the territorial robin,
brisk, beady-eyed, sees them all off.
I am not at all sure that this is the real world
but I am looking at it very closely.
Is landscape serious? Are birds? But they are fading
in dusk, in the crawling darkness. Enough.
Knowing no way to record what is famous
precisely for being unrecordable,
I draw the curtains and settle to my book:
Dr William Smith’s First Greek Course ,
Exercise Fourteen: third declension nouns.
My letters, awkward from years of non-use,
sprinkle over the page like birds’ footprints,
quaint thorny symbols, pecked with accents:
as I turn the antique model sentences:
The vines are praised by the husbandmen.
The citizens delight in strife and faction.
The harbour has a difficult entrance.
Weathering
Literally thin-skinned, I suppose, my face
catches the wind off the snow-line and flushes
with a flush that will never wholly settle. Well:
that was a metropolitan vanity,
wanting to look young for ever, to pass.
I was never a Pre-Raphaelite beauty,
nor anything but pretty enough to satisfy
men who need to be seen with passable women.
But now that I am in love with a place
which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,
happy is how I look, and that’s all.
My hair will turn grey in any case,
my nails chip and flake, my waist thicken,
and the years work all their usual changes.
If my face is to be weather-beaten as well
that’s little enough lost, a fair bargain
for a year among lakes and fells, when simply
to look out of my window at the high pass
makes me indifferent to mirrors and to what
my soul may wear over its new complexion.
Going out from Ambleside
1
He is lying on his back watching a kestrel,
his head on the turf, hands under his neck,
warm air washing over his face,
and the sky clear blue where the kestrel hovers.
A person comes with a thermometer.
He watches a ceiling for three minutes.
The person leaves. He watches the kestrel again
his head pressed back among the harebells.
2
Today he will go over to Langdale.
He springs lightly in his seven-league boots
around the side of Loughrigg
bouncing from rock to rock in the water-courses
evading slithery clumps of weed, skipping
like a sheep among the rushes
coursing along the curved path upward
through bracken, over turf to a knoll
and across it, around and on again
higher and higher, glowing with exaltation
up to where it all opens out.
That was easy. And it was just the beginning.
3
They bring him tea or soup.
He does not notice it. He is busy
identifying fungi in Skelghyll Wood,
comparing them with the pictures in his mind:
Purple Blewit, Yellow Prickle Fungus,
Puffball, Russula, two kinds of Boletus –
the right weather for them.
And what are these little pearly knobs
pressing up among the leaf-mould?
He treads carefully over damp grass,
patches of brilliant moss, pine-needles,
hoping for a Fly Agaric.
Scarlet catches his eye. But it was only
reddening leaves on a bramble.
And here’s bracken, fully
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