Ten favourite poets (in no particular order except the first)

Edwin Muir enfolding our story within the pattern of the Fable.

Kathleen Raine haunting the ideal as it moves across time.

Edward Thomas shaping the pastoral of a lost country.

T.S. Eliot exploring the traced lines of history and place in the mystical.

Wendell Berry celebrating community, place and Sabbath.

Constantine Cavafy memorialising his lost time, surrendered love and a forgotten history.

William Blake finding his cleansed doors of perception and the realities of prophecy.

Angelos Sikelianos recreating mythos in a Greek village, now and always.

Mary Oliver singing from nature into her naturalness.

Rabindranath Tagore balancing between knowing and unknowing, affirming even when denying.

Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car by William Blake

Archetype in the West of Poetic Inspiration

The Good Man in Hell

If a good man were ever housed in Hell

By needful error of the qualities,

Perhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil,

Or speak the truth only a stranger sees,

Would he, surrendering quick to obvious hate,

Fill half eternity with cries and tears,

Or watch beside Hell's little wicket gate

In patience for the first ten thousand years,

Feeling the curse climb slowly to his throat

That, uttered, dooms him to rescindless ill,

Forcing his praying tongue to run by rote,

Eternity entire before him still?

Would he at last, grown faithful in his station,

Kindle a little hope in hopeless Hell,

And sow among the damned doubts of damnation,

Since here someone could live, and live well?

One doubt of evil would bring down such a grace,

Open such a gate, and Eden could enter in,

Hell be a place like any other place,

And love and hate and life and death begin.

Edwin Muir

Comments

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...

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