Two Mystic Poets and a Bed Bug

Two Mystic Poets and a Bed Bug

One isn’t too surprised about the intimate knowledge of fleas for people who lived in those times when beds and houses were filled with varied creatures who lived alongside human beings very cosily.  In the past we were certainly in touch with Nature in all its moods and variety of living forms, be they pleasant to human beings or not, an animal species alongside all the other animals. They were considered as part of all the living things created by God and so must be studied, tolerated, accepted even if sometimes utterly disliked.  Nowadays, most of so called civilised humanity (those who live in civitas – Latin for towns) have a somewhat sentimental understanding of animals and a perfect horror of  insects, bugs, bacteria , mice, rats and anything that penetrates the sanctity of their homes. We are encouraged now to sanitise our houses into a safe, impenetrable sterility.  And I’m all for it as much as anyone else.

We seldom see flies these days.  But when meat hung on hooks over a fire, lay on a  platter in the larder or left uncovered at times, flies were naturally attracted to the home.  Now we have fridges and freezers; not places where a fly feels comfortable or willing to search for a meal. I remember still those frightful sticky fly catchers in the shape of colourful parrots dangling from my grandmother’s ceiling covered in nasty black victims and feel grateful for fridges and my little larder.  I have no objection to house spiders.  They do a useful job though those huge hairy creatures that seem to invade in the autumn and are especially fond of getting stuck in the bath, have to be fished out and sent off to the garden where they belong.

Many old erotic poems were written about fleas, strange as such a subject might seem.  The poet addressing his loved one would be envious of the creature’s ability to be close to his love in places he could not touch or reach, exploring her milk white bosom, crawling beneath her petticoats to inhabit those areas he would love to be able to explore himself!  This small creature had no boundaries, no conventions as the lover must needs have.  Its death at her hands at the height of its bliss as it sucks her blood was a metaphor for sexuality as the words ‘die’ and ‘kill’ were then considered  to be.  ‘The little death’ they called it because orgasm for a man was said to shorten his life span and take away something from him every time.  Nowadays we believe the exact opposite and say men who have regular sex live longer!   

Bianca Pnzoni Anguissola
 (the artists mother) by Sofonisba Anguissola
Italy 1557

Ladies apparently took to carrying around elaborately bejewelled little fur tippets or zibellino (italian for sable) which they apparently hoped might attract the fleas away from their bodies into the warm fur they held. A rather impossible notions as fleas like warmth it's true but they also want live creatures blood to feed on!  

Bernardino Luini: Lady with a flea fur 1515
Walter's Art Museum 

The first ‘flea’ poem is said to have been written by Ovid but there were others written or told before his.  John Donne’s famous poem ‘The Flea’ is following an older tradition but he uses it in a most effective, witty and cheeky manner to put forward his case to his lady love (whom we assume might have been the lady who later became his wife)

John Donne

John Donne is considered the foremost of the so called ‘metaphysical’ poets.  He was born on January22nd 1572 in London to a Catholic family at a time when Catholicism had been banned in England and scarcely tolerated.  Catholics were banned from many a career prospect in law, politics or the church.  Several members of Donne’s family were persecuted, tortured and considered as martyrs.  His own brother was imprisoned and forced under torture to give away a priest he had been sheltering.  The priest, William Harrington, was hung drawn and quartered, a nasty death  – for what sin?  But, of course, he was considered a traitor and dealt with accordingly.  As for poor Henry Donne, he died in prison of the bubonic plague.  This affected John Donne deeply and made him question his catholic faith.  He was ambitious and wished to prosper and no doubt realised that people were afraid of the Papists, convinced they would create some sort of revolution and call in support those countries still staunchly Roman Catholic and subservient to the Pope in Rome.

Donne must have had a charming and charismatic nature because he escaped all this family harassment.  Or perhaps he had the kind of nature like the tree that bent with the wind and thus survived the storm.  He was educated at a school in Oxford, admitted to Cambridge University at 14 years of age, accepted at 15 to study law at Lincoln’s Inn.  People had short lives in these days and packed action in from an early age.  After his studies he began to travel extensively abroad.  He appeared bent on some sort of diplomatic career, became a member of parliament and was eventually asked by King James (well – ordered really) to become  a cleric of the Anglican church.  He accepted this post and eventually became Dean of St. Paul’s in which great London church lie his remains.

He seems to have been quite a womaniser in his youth, hence many an erotic poem which he shared round his patrons for their amusement much as we might do on Facebook today. The portrait below was possibly painted for a lady he wished to attain.  The undone collar suggests this to some but it was in fact a fashion of the time. However, he eventually fell in love with Anne More and in 1601 married her secretly against the wishes of her father thus getting himself into trouble and even landing in Fleet prison.  He was eventually released but it affected his career. Anne bore him twelve children, of whom two were stillbirths.  The poor woman spent her life pregnant and nursing and caring for the family while Donne scraped a meagre living so that poverty was never far away.   Anne died after the last stillbirth in 1617.   Donne had loved her deeply and mourned her loss in his 17^th Holy Sonnet.  As far as we know, he was faithful to her, turning more and more towards spiritual matters, laced with doubts, questions and philosophies.

Donne’ poetry is unusual for the times, often beginning abruptly, full of sudden twists and turns, with unusual metaphors and contrasting, unexpected ideas (called conceits).  It was considered ‘physical’ poetry because poetic metres and styles changed after the laws of Aristotle . . . in other words after physics.   They are witty, ingenious poems, full of complex themes both sacred and profane.  His poetry was written for a few patrons and never published in his lifetime.  The love poems are sexual, sensual, quite different to the ideal of courtly love that had flourished with the troubadors where one’s lady was unobtainable, mysterious, a spiritual object rather than a carnal one.  Donne’s ladies are to be bedded and urgently, lustfully!  He seldom used classical mythology in his poetry as many other poets were wont to do a that time. Instead he chose plain words, plain speaking yet expressed in such a way as to make them fresh, original and even startling.

Thus we come to his amusing poem The Flea.   It has been conjectured that the letter ‘s’ in the fifteenth-sixteenth century looked very like an ‘f’ to gather the subtle ribaldness of ‘it sucked me first and now sucks thee’.  It’s a possibility that Donne might have hinted at this idea and his poems generally contain barely disguised references to states of arousal and bodily fluids being exchanged. Those Elizabethans were a saucy lot.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;

Thou know’st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,

Yet this enjoys before it woo,

And pampered swells with one blood made of two,

And this, alas, is more than we would do.

Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, nay more than married are.

This flea is you and I, and this

Our mariage bed, and marriage temple is;

Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,

And cloistered in these living walls of jet.

Though use make you apt to kill me,

Let not to that, self-murder added be,

And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail, in blood of innocence?

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?

Yet thou triumph’st, and say'st that thou

Find’st not thy self, nor me the weaker now;

’Tis true; then learn how false, fears be:

Just so much honor, when thou yield’st to me,

Will waste, as this flea’s death took life from thee.

Here’s an argument worthy of a lawyer’s mind.  The lustful lover argues that as the flea has bitten them both, it contains them united in love, a marriage bed, a marriage temple.  There is no sin, no shame in this - so why not make love and unite thus?  The lady isn’t convinced and makes to kill the flea and her lover tries to stay her hand but no.  ‘hast thou since purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?’ and not only that but she is triumphant in saying the flea’s death hasn’t affected them one little bit; it certainly hasn’t weakened them.   In which case, retorts the cunning lover, the tiny amount of life blood taken by the flea is like the tiny amount of honour she will lose by yielding to him.   It’s a merry poem and treats his lady as a person of equal wit and intelligence.

In contrast to this humorous look at the flea we turn to one far more horrifying.  The next poetical flea is actually a painting rather than a poem.  It was painted by the mystical poet and artist William Blake whose story I portrayed in my last blog. This tiny but exquisitely painted picture is called The Ghost of a Flea and hangs in the Tate Gallery in London.  Apparently the drawing of the Flea came about when Blake spent an evening with his friend John Varley.  Varley was a student of esoteric subjects and believed in the existence of spirits and those things which required ‘an eye to see and an ear to hear’– in other words those visions beyond the limits of the physical eye and ear and its limited capacities.  He knew that Blake had daily seen visions since an early age, one of which was a tree filled with bright angels and celestial beings and claimed to often be surrounded by ghostly beings as he painted.  Varley and Blake would often meet and hold a kind of séance together in which Varley would call up some historical or mythological being and Blake would sketch the vision that appeared to him.

On this particular occasion it seems as if the image of the Flea came spontaneously to Blake. Varley asked him to sketch it.  Blake did so, saying he saw it very clearly before him.  The result became the little painting now in the Tate.  It is beautifully finished with applied gold leaf on the stars.  A monstrous bull like creature is striding purposefully between rich brocade curtains as if on a stage, the background a starry night perhaps depicting the universe, a symbol of the creation or something greater than the creature, monstrous as it is.   The Flea’s snake like tongue seeks the bowl of food before it.  A strange vision.  But not the first such vision to be thus depicted by the artist.  Blake seemed to have had an inner or subconscious vision of such muscular, often horrifying beings who, for him, were epitomes of all that was loathsome and evil.  The only time he saw a ghost, according to Alexander Gilchrist, his Victorian biographer, was when he lived in Lambeth.  The ghost described was very similar to the vision of the flea and terrified Blake so much he turned and ran.

 

The Great Red Dragon
 and the Woman clothed with the Sun

What, we wonder, are these visions?  Modern psychology would say they were sub personalities drawn from his own unconscious mind, haunting him as such lost and long-forgotten inner beings do.  They certainly seem to be the Shadow side of Blake’s angelic visions.  Ghostly images do occur and many perfectly sensible, intelligent people claim to have seen them, especially when young.  When we are young, we are open to other realms and states of existence but this open state of mind narrows down till all we see in the end is that tiny portion of existence before our physical eyes – and even that but imperfectly – ‘as in a glass darkly’ – St. Paul would have said.   

Or as Wordsworth had it in Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream

The earth and every common sight

To me did seem

Appareled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore: -

Turn wheresoe’er I may

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

But Blake carried on seeing his visions up to the moment of his death.

William Blake: An Unseen Enemy.

            William Blakes’ soujourn in “Paradise”

         “If a Man is the Enemy of my Spiritual Life while he pretends to be the Friend of my Corporeal, he is a real enemy..”

                    William Blake, letter to Thomas Butts,  Felpham April 25th 1803

 

William Blake

That wonderful, fiery, genius William Blake whose ‘flashing eye’ expressed the indignation he felt at all forms of injustice and tyranny!  This ‘flashing eye’ and the vehement shouts of ‘False!’ were all that a young Chichester lad recalled in his old age of the famous trial of William Blake for evil, seditious and treasonable expressions against King George 111. *

This trumped up charge was the strange and malevolent ending of a period in Blake’s life that had at first promised to be financially successful; a time when he was apparently at his happiest.  Blake had as a friend a man called John Flaxman, a well meaning, though mundanely inspired person, who felt sympathetic towards Blake and wanted to help him along the ladder of success.  Flaxman recommended Blake as an artist-engraver to another friend of his, named William Hayley, a country gentleman who rather fancied himself as a poet.  Hayley was interested and agreed to befriend Blake and push his fortunes up the ladder of fame.  It was indeed a splendid opportunity for Blake and could have been a turning point in his career if he had so chosen.

Thus in 1800, Blake and his wife, Catherine, were invited to move to the pretty seaside hamlet of Felpham, where Hayley lived, so that he would be the closer to his new patron.  Blake now had a charming six-roomed cottage by the sea in exchange for the small residence in his beloved Lambeth which had been his for so many London years.  At this period of time everything seemed set for a new and splendid life cycle.  Blake loved his new home and felt tremendously free and for once surrounded by air, space and the glorious marine beauty of Nature.  It was Paradise and he and Catherine revelled in it all “courting Neptune for an embrace”.

           “we are safely arrived at our Cottage which is more beautiful than I thought it..... Heaven opens here on all sides her golden Gates; her windows are not obstructed by vapours; voices of Celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard and their forms more distinctly seen; and my Cottage is also a Shadow of their houses...... And Now Begins a New life because another covering of Earth is shaken off ” (letter to Flaxman written Sept.21.1800 Sunday Morning)

At the time that Blake wrote this letter uneasiness even then made its insidious undermining at the roots of his soul, the Dark Stranger had already entered Blake’s life and waited invisible in the wings.  We sense the underlying feeling of sacrifice of dreams, visions and all that upheld Blake’s inner soul, being traded in with a wrenching saturnine reluctance for the sober effort of now having to get down to life’s nitty gritty, like it or not.  Blake, after all, is what Jung would call a puer type, an eternal child as are so many creative geniuses.  Life’s boring realities are always at odds with the celestial vision.  But we all need bread and a roof over our heads and here was Blake’s chance to make good and make some money, fame and fortune.

Yet with all this promising beginning, this paradisical setting, that lurking God, whom Blake both adored and feared deeply and alternately named Satan, Urizen, Christ (as opposed to the mystical, loving figure of the man Jesus) crept in within a mere three years to sour it all, ending with the unpleasant incident of the trespassing soldier and a court case.  Thus the soldier in his way took the role of the serpent whose sinuous undermining led to the eviction of Adam and Eve from their Paradise home, a theme that Blake was forever depicting in his poetry and art. 

  

The Soldier’s Story:

Sometime in July of 1803 Blake’s apparently innocent and peaceful Felpham Paradise was invaded by a private from the troop of Royal Dragoons stationed nearby.  The man had been invited in to help cut the lawn by the gardener who omitted mentioning this to Blake. He was deeply angry for he hated soldiers, war-mongers and other minions of the State.  He had been an advocate of revolution, followed the works of Thomas Paine, Godwin and other outspoken people of the time, though like all these found the disturbing, grim reality nothing like the ideal.  Plus Blake was paranoid about his privacy; a loner who felt immensely threatened and invaded by the outside world.   He therefore asked the man to leave his garden.  The soldier was impertinent in reply; Blake asked again, the man threatened most unpleasantly to knock his eyes out.  Now Blake was known as a peaceable, good-natured  man and at his later trial many attested to his kindliness and peacefulness.  But there was a hot tempered side to him as well.  Here intruded therefore his own inner warmonger, the invasive soldier within, into the apparent peaceful temenos of his Felpham cottage.  Blake’s intense emotional reaction smacks of a Shadow issue.  An incident which was nothing in itself suddenly became a regular drama.

The incident took place some time between July and August 1803. Blake was already tired of William Hayley and his demands and planning to return to the more secluded atmosphere of London where one might lose oneself totally amidst the collective, while in Felpham he probably was far more of an eccentric object of interest and curiosity.  Certainly it would make Blake feel invaded by some unpleasant transgressor, a Dionysian element as if Neptune, whom he had welcomed at first as his friendly deity when he and Catherine moved to the seaside, was now creeping in as an invader and also as a deceiver.  For the soldier, fiercely ejected by Blake and marched back to his barracks took his own nasty revenge by lying about Blake and swearing that he had uttered words of sedition against the king and country, “damn the King, damn all his subject, damn his soldiers, they are all slaves, when Bonaparte comes, , it will be cut throat for cut throat and the weakest must go to the wall ; I will help him” and so forth.  

  

However, at the trial held at Chichester Jan.11th 1804 10.am,  the soldier was proved to be a down and out ruffian and liar and Blake was aquitted amidst the cheers of his many friends and well-wishers.  The whole incident was nonetheless a peculiar culmination to this time in his life when Blake could have chosen the easy path of conforming to what his patron Hayley needed and for once securing himself a less precarious mode of living which he sometimes seemed to yearn for.   But did he really stand a chance?   Flaxman, in introducing Blake to Hayley, had hinted that Blake would do best at teaching engraving and drawing, making “neat drawings of different kinds” and would be best to be discouraged from “any dependence on painting large pictures, for which he is not qualified either by habit or study”.  This led to Hayley’s well-meant rejection of Blake’s grander and individualistic  ideas from the start. 

“Natural Friends are Spiritual Enemies”.

Flaxman and Hayley were true friends, one might say, but Blake would later state the fact that “natural friends are spiritual enemies”.  What did he mean by this, we wonder?  And why were friendships and general dealings with the collective always so problematic for him?

These “friends” meant well from a worldly point of view, but Blake was not a worldly person.  If he had followed this path, sacrificed his visions and stuck to ‘neat drawings’ we would have yet another mediocre eighteenth artist who would have faded into obscurity with many others.   Blake constantly found himself passed over by those of lesser talents, illustrating books of inferior poets to himself.  By the time the incident took place with the soldier, he had already come to the end of his tether and this incident was probably an expression of his frustration and anger that Paradise had after all turned so sour.  He felt that it was in his native place, in Soho, London, that he was more at ease, more in tune with his visions.  And so he returned to live at South Molton St., a return to his beginnings so to speak for he was born near there.  Here he lived for 17 years, scarcely going out; here he wrote his great work “Jerusalem; the Emanation of the Giant Albion”.   So we cannot help but feel the unpleasant soldier was a better friend than Blake’s supposed benefactors.  And yet while at Felpham, Blake had written another of his great epic poems, “Milton” and drawn some of his finest works, so his time there was not at all bereft of angelic vision for all the difficulties encountered.

Angels and Devils, visions of Heaven and Hell.

 I will not cease from Mental Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my Hand

Till we have built Jerusalem

On England’s green and pleasant Land.

For a Sagittarian, with a Sun-Jupiter conjunction, Blake was strangely insular by nature.  But he has Cancer Rising plus the Moon in that sign in the 12th house.  Emotionally and by habit, he preferred the introverted, inward poetic gaze to the external, limited world of form. Form came through his fiery poetry and pictures. Though he adored Nature he never did landscape drawing for he saw everything with the mythic, imaginative eye that found meaning in all things.  Nature was suffused with the Divine and played upon his deepest emotions and feeling imbues all his works.

               If we take a look again at this important period round 1800-3 we sense  an inner reluctance to give up his dramatic, noble, fiery visions and spiritual values for cramping, dulling, rational, materialistic ones.  His visions are as meaningful now as they were then.  In fact, Blake was a very modern man and many of his pictures border on surrealism.  It is no wonder he appeals to modern man who is equally tormented by the same strange Faustian mixture of atheism, mysticism, cynicism and who tries to make sense of a politically correct  ideal world were all is acceptable and united in an all-embracing fusion yet oddly disintegrated, separate, chaotic, boundary-less and full of incessant anxieties and horrors.   

Blake did at least acknowledge that he had both an Angel and a Devil in him which is more than most of us do and his major works were centred round Milton who wrote Paradise Lost and Regained and Dante’s visions of Heaven and Hell, which Blake magnificently illustrated.  Basically Blake felt his view of God was all angelic and he criticised Dante ‘who sees Devils where I see None’ but this was palpably not the case.  True his tendency was to be positive and optimistic and joyful and see the good in everyone but this naturally had its judgmental, rejecting opposite lurking in the Shadow.  In fact, Blake had a peculiar, confused and tormented vision of God yet there is also the opposing vision of joyfulness, simplicity and colour, song, beauty which he called Orc, his “spiritual Sun”...as opposed to the natural Sun which he called Satan, the Greek Apollo.  Here he seems to speak of his own inner intuition of the Self, his inner core identity.  He tried over and over again to embody this fierce, highly personal vision of God in his work and to understand Him through it.  He painted, wrote of it all in his verses and songs and gloriously illustrated books with intense passion (Mercury in Scorpio square Mars-Neptune in Leo); the eternal struggle of the visionary against the cramping, stifling bonds of realism.  It also indicates the problems he always felt over well meaning friends who, while feeling intuitively that he was a talented person and genuinely trying to help him, seemed unable to truly understand his work or appreciate his real genius except towards the end of his life.   

 

Glad Day

Basically Blake was a true alchemist who had to follow the solitary path of his own Great Work, magician, distiller, dissolver, working unceasingly on his vision till the end of his life. He needed to be alone and retreat from the world for he was engaged on a supreme task.  His efforts were the superhuman efforts towards unity and cohesion of the disparate and confused pieces of oneself that float about in the psyche like the pieces of Osiris flung here and there by Dark Seth.  His beloved wife Catherine who worked patiently beside him, sublimating her own personality to help him, was his Isis, his soror mystica, the spiritual sister who labours with the alchemist on his task.  If anyone was Blake’s true friend it was this woman who gave up her life for him, grateful, loving, worshipping God through him – his companion till the end.

William Blake was born 28th November 1757 and died 12th August 1827

*  The Life of William Blake by Alexander Gilchrist  Ch. X1X p.172.  Everyman (J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd. )London

It is first mentioned to Hayley in the letter dated Aug 16th 1803 but there is no mention of it to Butts in a letter dated July 6th 1803.

see P.171-2 of Gilchrist’s book. for date of trial, charge against Blake.

Other books used:  The Portable William Blake:  Viking Press New York 1946

                     William Blake  by Kathleen Raine  Thames and Hudson, London  1977

 

Discovering a Treasure Trove: the poems of Seamus Heaney

 

Seamus Heaney

I have to confess to something very sad.  I had never heard of Seamus Heaney till recently.  I mean to say, he is a greatly acclaimed Irish poet, the winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize for literature who died only a year ago in 2013.  And there was a programme about him on Country File.  I missed all this.  Where was I?

I think this dire omission is because my mind has always been somewhat closed to ‘modern’ poetry.  I’m an unashamed Romantic Philosopher myself and my joy in poetry is derived from the works of William Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and I might kindly go as far as the War Poets, Yeats, Ted Hughes - just about - and a few others.  Then I stop.  (I’m sorry, I can’t abide Sylvia Plath and always felt sorry for Ted faced with this neurotic, narcissistic wife) 

So basically, in the eyes of many, I am a poetry ignoramus.

But thankfully I have a wonderful literature tutor who talks to us about many styles and aspects of literature.  This lady is 80 years old but with a mind sharp as a razor, a memory that holds a library of literary knowledge and who walks about as if she was still only 40.   Her undying enthusiasm and love for her subject, her readiness to learn about new subject matter herself is so inspiring.  I went rather reluctantly to her afternoon talk on Seamus Heaney.  The poems she sent us to bone up on looked incomprehensibe, even pecualiar at times.  Did I really care about this poetry?  

However I went.  And as always, Angela turned the afternoon to one of fascinated interest and exploration into many aspects of this poetry.  Interesting understanding I'd like to share. 

It's all so different when poetry is read aloud.  We then hear the melodic cadences, the unusual words that suddenly aren’t so strange but perfectly appropriate.  Hearing Heaney read his poetry in his soft Irish lilt gave new meaning to it all. When we learns the story behnd it the poem and understand the background and life of the poet, it gives his work a new dimension, a background picture.  All springs to life as if a light has been cast upon a dark corner to reveal a treasure hiding there. 

Seamus Heaney was born in Northern Ireland but lived all his life in Dublin and always associated himself with the Republic of Eire.  He is not an overtly political poet and yet there many little words and phrases that give away his background and the constant underlying fear that was in the hearts of the Irish people.  One poem called A Constable Calls from an album called North (1975) shows this fear well.  It describes a scene from Heaney’s young life when a policeman came to visit the family.  he bore with him an official ledger to take tillage returns, in other words to assess exactly what was produced and grown.  The poem is full of references such ‘the pedal treads (of the policeman’s bicycle)  hanging relieved of the boot of the law’ 

Arithmetic and fear.

I sat staring at the polished holster

With its buttoned flap, the braid cord

Looped into the revolver butt.

The Americans might not find this so alarming but the British are unused to policemen with revolvers. However, it was a necessary fact of life in Northern Ireland at that time. The poem ends with the knowledge that his father has withheld the fact he had planted a few turnips at the bottom of the potato field and not declared them.  Guilt and fear enters the boy's heart on his father's behalf.  As the policeman goes we have the lines:

A shadow bobbed in the window.

He was snapping the carrier spring

Over the ledger.  His boot pushed off

And the bicycle ticked, ticked, ticked.

The last line evokes the sound of the wheels perhaps on cobbles or rough ground but it also has the menacing notion of a bomb.  And there were plenty of those going off in Ireland during the troubles. So many troubled young people living with this kind of fear as an everyday image even today.

Heaney wrote a good deal about his childhood as have many poets.  My favourite is Blackberry Picking from his first album Death of a Naturalist (1966).  Most of these remembered childhood scenes start with a sense of innocence and joy which suddenly turns to dismay and even revulsion as he encounters Nature’s darker side.  The blackberries so plump and sweet and delicious when picked can't be kept.  They begin to grow mould and turn sour and stink.  He wants to keep them forever but it’s impossible (certainly in those days of no freezers!)  But nature cannot be captured like this, all is death and decay eventually. Thus is Paradise Lost and the garden of Eden left behind and the boy is obliged to grow up and face the adult world of toil, violence and disillusion.  This always reminds me of Wordsworth’s ‘shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy’ or the poetry of William Blake which speaks with equal sorrow about our lost innocence and childhood joy.  I’ve even written a poem like this myself, a feeble one I know. There are so many poets who have expressed that intense sense of loss of a childhood time when the mind and heart is free of the corruption of adult knowledge, empty of later experiences and ready to find every new experience a source of wonder and awe.  

Heaney, the eldest of nine children, lost his young bother aged four in a car accident.  He describes the sadness and pain of this in his poems.  He wrote many poems about family which are full of tenderness and love. His ability to paint a portrait or a scene is wonderful and many words in the poems appeal to the senses.

The automatic lock clunks shut (The Blackbird of Glanmore)

She sat all day as the sun sundialled

Window splays across the quiet floor.  (Chairing Mary)

…its flesh was sweet

Like thickened summer wine; summer’s blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue.  (Blackberry-Picking)

I could go on but maybe you should just take a look at this poems for yourself!  Thank you my dear tutor for bringing this poetry to me and opening my mind to something new and wonderful.  And thank you Seamus for writing these evocative poems.