Tributes

‘I hear the bouncing hills/Grow larked and greener at berry brown/Fall and the dew lark sing/Taller this thunderclap spring’… such language of Dylan Thomas caught my breath when I was around thirteen. His fantastic lyricism and immediacy of being seemed inescapable. All caught through a highly charged imagination inspired by the loveliness of his countryside and its people. Such beautiful and zestful language of youthfulness bonded well with my memories as a youngster of exalting in and running wild amongst the bushes and shrubs of Putney Heath… and climbing tall trees from where I commanded a world of thrilling and fantastical horizons…… (and from where I jeered at the portly local Park Warden…..who couldn’t catch slippery-as-an-eel me!!!!)

And then came the extreme devastation and helpless trauma of the ‘terrible sonnets’- but Gerard Manley Hopkins was also a fabulous nature poet brimming with joy and passionate wonder. He frequently displayed a flurry and richness of image piled on image in breathtaking speed. His work was often of strange construction and of intense yet delicate and detailed observation. ‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-/dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon in his/riding.’ He was master of dazzling innovative language and rhythm rebelling in a kind of inspired defiance. He created overwhelming beauty building a fresh metaphysics rich in revelation and seeming to grasp at Plato’s essence of things.

And later I stumbled on a completely different kettle of fish - a very controlled and meditative poetry aiming for musical perfection. A meditative soul-searching in which Elliot’s sense of constant love prevails. In the Waste Land we recognise again the sadness and disillusionment generated by Elliot’s own mental illness and the horrors of the WW I. But then he struggles free of anguish to more sanguine moods. In Four Quartets there is a highly moving meditative work of great literary achievement dwelling on the nature of time and its interrelation with the human condition. As he wanders through the garden Krishna seems to whisper to him as he muses upon rose, birdsong and vacant pool drawing from them a deep mystical experience and communion by which he reaches the innermost grace of ‘the still point’ and where ‘Love is itself unmoving/Only the cause and end of movement/Timeless and undesiring.’

I would like to thank these three guys wherever they might be. They opened my eyes and I am grateful that they led to my eventual love of literature and the arts in general. They were and are my artistic roots – thanks once again guys!