Green corn

On this misty, rainy morning we climbed a hill ...

and walked through the bluebell woods ...



... and along a leyline and passed a church and two dogs and their owners and marvelled at the bluebells and the cornflowers and the pink campions and the rape (ugh, hate that word but the fields are shockingly, wonderfully yellow) and the red soil. And against the red soil the green, young green wheat, green woodlands. In the field, larks rose around us, singing.





A verse from the John Masefield hymn came to mind

Lo, all my heart's field red and torn
and thou wilt bring the young green corn
the young green corn divinely springing
the young green corn for ever singing.






Echoes of long ago school assemblies. Horrible, I hated my schooldays but on this particular morning the angst has faded and I'm not going to quibble about the religious theme. Masefield, the avid reader, seafarer and eventual Poet Laureate, was a local lad: he knew about red soil. And it is a beautiful poem ....

... the laughter of holy white birds flying after

On this hill, the parliamentarian armies laid siege to our royalist city in the valley below over four centuries ago. The men were so hungry they ate the cider apples in the orchards and the potatoes and robbed the farmhouses of bread and towards the end in extremis resorted to eating acorns. Difficult to imagine today in all this greenery and lushness. Indeed, the land is almost too perfectly cared for, too well manicured: wild flowers flourish along the lanes, no pesticides on these verges, no litter that I could see. A mystery solved when the landowner's name is spotted on a notice. Enough to convert one into a present-day royalist.



The hardest part of the walk was the last part, climbing the hill for the second time. A steep, hard pull. Near the summit we rested on a log on the edge of the wood in silence for five minutes or so. The field in front of us rose steeply, the line of the horizon curved like a giant's back recumbent against the sky. Raindrops on leaves. The moist smell of earth. The harsh call of a pheasant. The distant murmur of traffic, faint but just discernible. I hadn't wanted to come out this morning, had something on my mind, hadn't wanted to see anyone. Yet growing older, I have learned from experience that I don't always know what's good for me and consequently can be persuaded. By people I trust, by an uncertain yet stubborn faith in the apparently random flow of life.




"Shall we go?" my companion asks. We head for the car. Next stop, the house and a late lunch.

...

The shoulder still stiffens when I spend too long here at the computer. I overdid it on Friday and it took thirty six hours for the pain to subside. Thank god that nothing is obligatory in the blogosphere. Short posts, long posts. Whatever works. Right now, photographic posts seem to fit the bill. I love taking photographs and it's easier on the body than writing.

Sunday

Houseplants watered.

****

Something Understood is a modest radio gem from the BBC.
Gentle, contemplative, conducive to reflection.

The frustration is in the timing, as the 30 minute programme goes out on Sundays at 6.00am or 11.30pm. I’m either half awake or asleep, so I miss the presenter - Mark Tully, always worth hearing - as he introduces words and music, from all faiths and none, on life, hope, despair, prayer. And so on. The big stuff.

The good news is that the Beeb now has an iPlayer facility, so I can sleep in and catch the programme over the first coffee of the day. Just click on the link above.

This week’s subject: Happiness. Contributions from Sophocles, a Tibetan singer, an Islamic scholar, Tracy Chapman. Several modern compositions, including an achingly beautiful setting of the Beatitudes from the Taize Community. An interview with the Abbot of Worth Abbey on the monastic tradition, boredom and the difference between the robustness of the intention to do good and the fragility of feeling good. Readings.

And a musical setting of this:

Xaipe 65

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of allnothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e e cummings

Not sure if the iPlayer works outside the UK or not. I hope it does.

Le Plat Pays

Weide in de lente - Veldweg: Albijn Van den Abeele

Waiting in for a carpet to be delivered a few Saturdays ago I caught a fascinating radio programme, Brel et Moi, featuring the Belgian singer/songwriter, Jacques Brel and presented and written by Alastair Campbell (yes, that Alastair Campbell). Such a short life. A serial womaniser in Paris, a demanding paterfamilias in Brussels. Self centred and driven but loved by those he worked with and, heavens, what a talent.

Years ago the Brel song that seduced me was Le Plat Pays (the Flat Land), a love song to his native Flanders. A poem in its own right, lyrical and elegaic. I was born and spent my childhood in a similarly flat land of earth, water and wide skies on the other side of the North Sea and the song stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it. It still does.

Maybe only a Belgian could pull it off. Using each of the four winds Brel celebrates the different moods and seasons of this modest and - nowadays at least - peaceful stretch of land. He opens himself to embrace the rain and cold and the tedium and monotony, as well as warmth and sunlight. Winter. Summer. Everything in between.

The lyrics are below. I'm not attempting a translation. There are a few versions floating around on the web but they don't really reach the level of the original. According to one contributor to the programme there is a view that Brel's work is pretty much untranslatable and it's true that those songs that have made it into English haven't necessarily benefitted. One of the other contributors, Mel Smith, is a Brel devotee who neither reads nor understands French: the ferocious intensity, the sweat and saliva (literally) of Brel's performances were enough to captivate him.

Cue for a video of a mesmerising live performance of Le Plat Pays. Enough of my words. Listen.



Avec la mer du Nord pour dernier terrain vague
Et des vagues de dunes pour arrêter les vagues
Et de vagues rochers que les marées dépassent
Et qui ont à jamais le cœur à marée basse
Avec infiniment de brumes à venir
Avec le vent de l'ouest écoutez-le tenir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec des cathédrales pour uniques montagnes
Et de noirs clochers comme mâts de cocagne
Où des diables en pierre décrochent les nuages
Avec le fil des jours pour unique voyage
Et des chemins de pluie pour unique bonsoir
Avec le vent de l'est écoutez-le vouloir
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec un ciel si bas qu'un canal s'est perdu
Avec un ciel si bas qu'il fait l'humilité
Avec un ciel si gris qu'un canal s'est pendu
Avec un ciel si gris qu'il faut lui pardonner
Avec le vent du nord qui vient s'écarteler
Avec le vent du nord écoutez-le craquer
Le plat pays qui est le mien

Avec de l'Italie qui descendrait l'Escaut
Avec Frida la Blonde quand elle devient Margot
Quand les fils de novembre nous reviennent en mai
Quand la plaine est fumante et tremble sous juillet
Quand le vent est au rire quand le vent est au blé
Quand le vent est au sud écoutez-le chanter
Le plat pays qui est le mien.

Jacques Brel

More insight into the inspiration for the song? There's a set of masterly, evocative photographs of Le Plat Pays here, just a click away.

I keep returning to them.

Midnight

The words won't come. Much is happening and very little of it translates to a blog post. Thoughts come and go, drift and evaporate. Looking back I see that August has been the month in each of the past two years that I've taken a blog break. Hmmm.

****

In the middle of the night, last night, I woke up. Power cut. No habitual shadows on the wall from the street light. I reach for the bedside lamp. Click. Nothing. No World Service murmering by my left ear. I shuffle to the window and look out over a sea of total, unaccustomed dark.

****

Leading onto a middle-of-the-night poem by Ted Hughes. Out of season, but who cares. I've only recently discovered this and I absolutely love it, the symbolism, the physicality of the description of a very non-physical event.


The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

Train (Updated)

Update: I also love synchronicity. Today's issue of the Guardian contains an absorbing article on Edward Thomas. Poetry. Therapy. Ecology. Makes me want to read more.

I love train travel.

Apparently a serious expansion of the rail network is planned for 2020 or thereabouts. Good. In addition to the high speed lines though, what about re-opening at least some of the branch lines that were closed (thank you Dr Beeching) in the 1960s? They will probably be needed sooner or later.

****

It is indeed late June, so an unashamedly famous ode to a now-defunct country station about an hour's drive from here, on one of those vanished local lines. The poet, Edward Thomas, was killed in battle in 1917 during the First World War. (He was born in the same year - 1878 - as my grandfather: the latter had a defect in one eye and so was excused the call-up).

Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Some one cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and around him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.


The context of the war has turned the poem into an elegy for lost innocence and a world that never really existed. Yet its real theme is the wonder of the present moment. And the power of the unexpected.

A sudden halt. High summer. A hiss of steam, and the observation that (I think) makes the poem: the clearing of the throat. The song of the blackbird.

It takes shock or ecstasy or good company to jolt me into the present moment, application and some kind of faith to live in it on a daily basis, if only for seconds at a time. Even as a child - little worrier that I was, living in a stressful home - I found it difficult. No guarantees. No wonder so few manage it. No wonder I tried to escape.

One minute, one second at a time. Feel. Breathe. Sing.

Photograph uploaded at Poems and Prose by Kendrive.The original station sign, preserved in a nearby bus shelter.