Poetic infancy - no laughing matter

I was never one for poetry. I didn´t object when approached by prose raised to the skies, but I never heard more than a faint sob of the beauty others seemed to hear in loud bellows. I was too busy with the one dimension in front of me, that I rarely felt the need to contemplate plunging into other levels of conciousness. I skimmed through the lines, sometimes repeatedly, in attmepts to force the meaning to jump up at me. But often I just thought it...flat... It was like being that one person not getting the joke that all the rest were laughing at hard.

But then the world went topsy turvy (as the venerable Bernard Black would say), and Malin had to re-consider her priorities. I won´t go in to the details of the severity of that undertaking (again), and there is still a long way to go, but suddenly I realise that I have all the time in the world. I wish someone had gone ahead and kicked in a bit of this revelation long time ago, but in fairness I was probably way to thick-headed to stray from the fast lane and stop to smell the flowers anyway.

Now, this still doesn´t mean I´m much for poetry. I come from a long line of blue-collar folk, who in Voltaire-ish fashion see the only route to happiness through sweat and honest hard labour. But I´m willing to give the odd verse a second chance.

And so I found it.

Flicking through old Facebook messages I stopped at one with a poem Tom sent me a while back. I don´t recall reading it at the time, but I probably did, and in my restless frame of mind, it failed to leave a mark. But this time I lingered on it and realized that Thomas Hardy had put in words something of that feeling that washes over me when I walk in ancient footsteps. A brief notion that by taking part in their landscape I feel like they never really left.

Well thats what it portrays to me

Thank you Tom, and Tom, I finally got the joke, and I enjoyed it immensely :-)

At Castle Boterel

As I drive to the junction of lane and highway,
And the drizzle bedrenches the waggonette,
I look behind at the fading byway,
And see on its slope, now glistening wet,
Distinctly yet

Myself and a girlish form benighted
In dry March weather. We climb the road
Beside a chaise. We had just alighted
To ease the sturdy pony's load
When he sighed and slowed.

What we did as we climbed, and what we talked of
Matters not much, nor to what it led,
-Something that life will not be balked of
Without rude reason till hope is dead,
And feeling fled.

It filled but a minute. But was there ever
A time of such quality, since or before,
In that hill's story? To one mind never,
Though it has been climbed, foot-swift, foot-sore,
By thousands more.

Primaeval rocks form the road's steep border,
And much have they faced there, first and last,
Of the transitory in Earth's long order;
But what they record in colour and cast
Is - that we two passed.

And to me, though Time's unflinching rigour,
In mindless rote, has ruled from sight
The substance now, one phantom figure
Remains on the slope, as when that night
Saw us alight.

I look and see it there, shrinking, shrinking,
I look back at it amid the rain
For the very last time; for my sand is sinking,
And I shall traverse old love's domain
Never again.


Thomas Hardy