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Saturday, July 26, 2014

A poem for me

I don't particularly want to be labeled as a pollyanna but cancer has brought interesting new experiences and some firsts. One of those is this: Alan Brooks wrote a poem for me. With his permission I have copied the poem below. Here are some links to material which might help you enjoy it. You can choose to look at those links before reading the poem, after reading it or not at all. This is the original poem, titled Adlestrop, which is referenced in the title and text, here it is read by Richard Burton and here is some information on its author, Edward Thomas.

Adlestrop Revisited
            for Christine Nielsen


I too remember Adlestrop, that name
murmuring of Edwardian summer
heat, blue sky and small, still clouds,
the new-cut fields, the train’s unexpected
pause, the open windows and the song
of birds charming the poet’s ear
to the very edges of the twinned bucolic shires:
the fulgent calm before the onslaught
of the August guns.

Was this the unassuming place
to which his mind turned from the trenches,
the muck and stench – this single minute
his refuge of remembered music
in the midst of carnage – his mild paradise?
Was he there again, abstracted,
as he stood to light his pipe
when the concussive shell
sent him straight to heaven or to hell?

I too saw Adlestrop, only the name,
as my own train from London rattled by
one afternoon. It was the late ‘70s;
the sign a held glimpse in a long row of green.
I don’t remember hayfields. Was it late June?
Summer surely, but, windows closed,
heat if there was heat kept itself outside.
Still, "Adlestrop," and I could feel myself
turned back some sixty years and more
to linger in that simple perfect place.

Poetry came to him along with war.
Three years at most of each,
one hundred forty verses more or less,
and yet those so un-modern lines,
their speaking of a world already obsolete,
echoed long after the guns fell silent.
"He was the father of us all," said Hughes.
Through the second and more wars since,
and all the troubled peace,
a century on, here in this old New World,
the birds still sing and hold me
in a place both now and in-between.
...................................

In the season of biting flies,
in the season of morning fogs
burned off by afternoon to blowtorch winds,
in the time of thunderstorms,
of mosquitoes mobbing the screens at dusk,
there are those days now and again
when the mist lifts and the breeze comes fresh and clean
for a midday hour or two.
I think of you then.
I think of you too in the days of humid heat
you love so well, and seek, and in the long evenings
shortening already, though one can
hardly as yet tell.

The sky is too big here, with always
something going on. I wish,
but so far no fair-weather cloudlets,
lonely and still as haycocks. Smears, streaks,
broad strokes, washed blues and roiling masses.
I think of you day by day, even when alone
surrounded by friends and love.
We are so far from Adlestrop.
Yet here they are, at last –
soft as downland sheep watched
by the slow-moving sun.
It feels a kind of coming home.
...................................

Beeching’s axe fell hard and sharp on Adlestrop,
severing the goods trains from the platforms first.
Another swing and down the station went,
one hundred years and more smashed up
and hauled away as bricks and dust.
That was 1966. I turned up one year later
on the liner Maasdam, Montreal to Southampton:
the anchor dropping in a hard blow, the ship listing
half the night, the morning harbor all
whitecapped blue. Disembarking
to the storybook sight of bobbies, red call boxes,
and those little trains like a model railroad
or something out of Disneyland.
I took one up to London, then to Birmingham:
not the Cotswold line. That would have to wait.

Britain chose the lorry, car and motorway:
Adlestrop became another hamlet without purpose
except now as a bit of picturesqueness
(heritage rating 3 of 5) and place of pilgrimage
by those who love the poem. The station
sign, I’m told, was placed outside the bus
shelter and a station bench is also there,
enclosed, bearing the poem as a plaque.
If I could visit, I would pass it by.
But I could swear the sign, some sign,
was there along the track that later year.

And what if it wasn’t really there?
If all I saw athwart the rocking car
was anonymous bland greenery
from Oxford all the way to Gloucester?
The sign some ectoplasmic emanation
of the writer’s mind made visible
and carried by a lyric held by heart?
Would it matter? I go there at my will.
It is a place of peace. I go there still.
.................................

In the season of the hermit thrush,
fluting awake the dawn, and of the midday ovenbird,
I think of you.
In the season of full flowering,
of the second mowing,
of high summer before the turn,
of the deep in-breath before
whatever is to come.

Where is your respite now, in these heavy days,
your heart’s ease and clear-headed calm?
Your place of blue skies and
fair-weather cumulus? You’ve told us.
Somewhere warm along the old canal,
upstate New York. Medina,
Chittenango, maybe Clyde.

I see you cycling steadily, unhurried,
aware of all around: the still water,
grit under tires, pasture smell,
a duck splashing down ahead.
Do you hear a meadowlark?

I see you among the small towns
and villages of that route, riding
where you will, taking in
the history, taking photos in memory,
knowing that at the end
you’ll find a gallery or museum,
or lunch at a cafe, sitting under
some old shade tree, a glass of Malbec,
sun dappling the grass,
alone in the bright moment,
uncaring, Adlestrop at last.
 Alan Brooks 
7/15/14-7/22/14

It is obvious that Alan did research that helped him understand more about the original poem, its author and the history of the place he references. His poem would not be the same without the information he collected.

Did you check out the links I provided above? What do you think about adding context to your experience of a work of art?  I, for one, appreciate background information which may help me extend my appreciation of a piece. In eighth grade I took an experimental course called 'Interrelated Arts'. The three instructors worked hard to place visual, written and musical pieces into their historical context and show their relationship to one another. I have very strong memories of discussions about the rococo period and about Picasso's Guernica and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.

I think that course did a great deal to shape how I approach the activity of attending to works of art. I wonder if it also formed my own attitude to making art. I find it next to impossible to make something unless I can see/feel the way it fits into a greater whole.






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