From a College Window

A.C. Benson (1862-1925) was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge from 1915-1925. He was one of the many talented children of E.W. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his wife, Mary. (The children included E.F. Benson, author of the Mapp and Lucia novels, and Fr R. H. Benson, the Catholic convert.)
   A. C. Benson's civilized essays, redolent of Victorian and Edwardian days, are a delight to read. His easy knowledge and loquacity, combined with self-deprecation, put most of our contemporary "controversialists" - nearly all of them influenced by social Marxism - to shame (although his work and stance are vulnerable to Cardinal Newman's strictures on the English gentleman).
   I picked up Benson's volume of essays, From a College Window, by chance in a second-hand shop and greatly enjoyed it. I wrote this sonnet in respectful tribute.

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(A. C. Benson)

The drowsy fire, the shadowed room, shrug off

The autumn chill; the gyp bows his retreat;
Tapping glibly his eye-glass, the don with soft
Decision strikes through a freshman’s gauche conceit.

Later, dinner in hall; tomorrow chapel:

Gowned beneath plain windows indulgent scholars
Will nod; the timid chaplain’s black-scarfed grapple
With Erastian good sense will shew God’s favours.

Mild duty done, that afternoon the men

In the Common will jostle like muddy cattle,
Their games a path to a Secretary’s room
Or parsonage loud with a singing kettle.

Drifting, the don starts up at his student’s jest:

“The Decalogue – a matter of good taste.”

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© July 2012

Months: July

The poems for March, April, May and June in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March, 20 April and 24 May.

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The month of window boxes: horned nasturtiums,
Petunias and breaking-wave lobelia
Sparkle: the dark-leaved tart geraniums
Are cautious but the party-plate regalia

Of passion flowers trumps all. With a glutton’s smile

Blowsy St John’s Wort bubbles like custard.    
In town’s-edge roughlands children with low guile
Behead dandelions and storm the clustered

Ice cream flutes of bindweed. Ignored, the breeze

Scuffles the rank bushes like gushing water.
Grasshoppers, dauntless among vetch and furze,
Grind their tissue-and-comb call for a partner.

Beyond are the woods. Tall spruce and dense beech

Flash fresh growth. Beneath their shade-cool awning
Wood wasps dart and sing in the sun’s hot shaft,
Moths start from the path dust and grubs hang, dancing

On threads. Hidden, a train soughs through a culvert.

Such musky disarray! Boles, lichened boughs,
Hang, lean, lie, trellised by ivy, inert
To the gross-feeding fungus. Spider and louse

Forage under dust-heavy ferns; the brown

Dunnock, pattering, will devour them. High
On a birch’s flaky trunk a flame-crown
Woodpecker scatters bark, laughing mournfully:

Summer’s workshop of instinct and sensation

Echoes with breeding, killing and mutation.

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© July 2013

Months: June

The poems for March, April and May in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014, 21 March and 20 April.

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Summer solstice: for immortal hours the sun
Dazzles tarmac and field, boiling greatly
And large in the sky. Day’s eternity done,
Rises the moon like beaten pewter, stately

And immense. Honeysuckle chivvies the lanes

With scent, strengthened with the tang of the year’s
First cut of silage. Men are urgent – thanes
To daylight’s drug, fixing tools, greasing gears.

The ash has tardily leaved above hawthorn

Sudsily frothing; nettles and grasses
Are purple, stifling the curded viburnum:
Dogs dustily tumble in madcap races.

Each morning the blatant chatter of sparrows

Rouses streets like coins rattled in a bowl;
Goldcrest flash in a larch’s dark narrows;
In brakes a pheasant dodges with his red poll.

From waxy buttercups to black-cupped poppies

All is profusion. The cream-cake roses –
Luscious in odour – shadow gentilities
Of pot plants – marigolds and flat-faced pansies;

The tough cascading foxglove is aloof.

Forgotten, a stream placid over gravel
Turns a waterwheel, dousing each paddle’s growth
Of wet-dark moss. Beneath its muted trundle

The water puzzles as if seeking sense;
The wheel turns without end or consequence.

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© June 2013

Months: May

The poems for March and April in this sequence were posted on 24 February 2014 and 21 March.
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At last, a thrilling warmth and milk-fresh light
Announce the illimitable fullness of spring;
It’s there in the magpie’s rat-a-tat flight
And the terror the squirrel’s leap can bring.

Verge grass and spring wheat gyrate in the wind

Dislodging the greedy linnet; unfriendly gorse
Muskily blooms whilst irises, determined
As barmaids, loll, magnificently coarse.

Meringue-like cumulus wanders the sky

Worrying the chattering bluebells below;
Damp banks like biers where the dead daffodils lie
Will be purged for new growth by the groundsman’s hoe.

A seawater dusk displays Venus’ pearl:

Since nipping dawn men have been fraught as bees;
Now, placid pigeons roost among leaves whose furl
Glows goldenly in the draining sun’s lees.

Not all is beauty: the rough-skinned dock swells

Grossly, leprous and kibbled, and spleenwort
Spoils all; but the laburnum’s butter-curl bells
Are cheerful, and forget-me-not is pert.

The pink emulsioned jay and bouncy wren

Fuss for their young: girls in their summer show
Ripen for mating, root-making, children;
Their men sweat and provide; but if they sow

Shall they reap? Vainglory tempts them to the hill’s peak:

If crossed, will they return with what they seek?

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© May 2012

Months: April

The poem for March in this sequence was posted on 24 February 2014.

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Dawn is early: the redbreast has shrilled his claim
Before men rise; later, the thrush’s evening
Ululation pierces the copper flame
Of sunset. Between, starlings are scavenging.

A blue sky convects warmth through the chill air

But soon, beetle-browed cloud like dusk, slings hail
From a freezing wind, smashing petals, stripping bare
The tulips. A drenched leaf flaps like a sail.

The exposed becomes covered. The dead-end nook

Piled with bramble stalks, torn plastic, rotted wood,
Is swamped by rhododendron – a closing book
Composting silence beneath its heavy hood.

Unstoppable, growth multiplies; grass glistens

Under sodden sunlight; grape hyacinth
Shake fists, crowded by nettles, dog parsley listens
For the bee, quailing at the sudden rain’s rinse.

Ah, how the young relax! Their clenched shoulders

Of winter expand, they laugh into each others’
Eyes in a flurry of pairing. That which moulders
Is regenerate; the martin at its nest hovers.

There are losses. A fluffed, sick sparrow huddled

Beneath a hawthorn attracts a barrel-faced crow.
Old men, surviving winter, shrunk and muddled,
Await their predator, whose knock they will know.

Undeterred, magnolias like fireworks spume;

A child exults, lord of both womb and tomb.

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© April 2012

The Roses and the Sparrow

This minature sonnet was originally in the set of sonnets, 'Edinburgh: An Occasional Sequence', which I posted on 26 December 2011. However, when revising the poems I couldn't see what it was doing there - having no direct connection with Edinburgh or even Scotland. Hence, I removed it and then lost it on my computer. It has now come to light and seems to me just about worth preserving.

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The evening sun is not so bright
That roses do not add
A sort of quintessential light
That cancels all that’s sad.

A sparrow scuffled in the soil

In search of grubs or grain,
To me its ceaseless feathered toil
Was like a twist of pain.

For what is beautiful and seems

As peaceful as the lotus streams
Is but a point of view;
This sparrow, urgent at the fall
Of night’s frustrating lunar pall,
Might not agree with you.                                     

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© September 1980

Months: March

In March 2012 I decided to write a sequence of twelve poems about the months - all the poems to be in the same form and each written in the month, each based on a close observation of the natural phenomena around me. All went well until June 2012 when the weather was so atypical I gave up for a couple of months, resuming the sequence in August and finishing in February 2013. Subsequently, the poems for June and July were written in June and July 2013. I propose to post the poems month by month and gather them together as a sequence at the end.

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MARCH

The ache, the ache of existence: winter’s

Stupor irresistibly shaken, old bones
Groan, dry boughs stretch, splitting bark, shedding splinters:
Fecundity ignites in roots and cones.

Dawn light prises sullen sleep; tits and finches

Call greedily, bullying the early growth,
Ignoring winter’s shrunk fodder which pinches
The gut. Lichen bulks up like simmering broth.

Oh, but sinews are stiff, flesh grey, its sap

Barely moistening this slow cold body, galled
By the tug of procreation yet, hands in lap,
Stranded by lethargy, coffined and palled.

The air is lethal, unlocking its grip,

Swelling in warmth to bamboozle the fox
To break cover, the shambling hedgehog to slip
From the kerb, its blood stippling the road like pox.

Reversals are abrupt and perishing;

Viscous fog plasters the sun, throttles crisp shoots;
Puce morning winds curdle the sky, punishing
Shaven cheeks, wan fingers and thought of fruits.

Regardless, the brawn of being explodes;

Every night lithe stems and tendrils seize ground;
Stubborn leaves unwind from a tangle of woads;
Forsythia leaps at the low clouds like yellow sound.

Remorselessly, blood thickens: hide-scarred men

In anguish must forage, fight and build. Again.

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© March 2012