Gradually over the years keeping a diary has become a ritual in my life. As well as writing a few notes on the day’s happenings, encounters, experiences and the world’s unending oddities, I preserve for further thought and sharing especially poems but also passages from books and articles that deluge through my life.
When I look back it is astonishing how much accumulates to encourage thought and provide a hundred conversations with friends. I think with a pang how many lifetimes it would take really to get to the bottom of things – and even then it wouldn’t happen.
One thing is sure. Life is endlessly fascinating and this world spinning through eternity limitless in its glories. I dip here and there and pull out some reading notes for inspection.
- The poems of the early 20th century American poet Robinson Jeffers have fallen into obscurity. He remains a favourite of mine – and I am certain that as time goes on his great poetry, especially about the natural beauty of the world, will again be read with wonder. Here is a very small poem, but a jewel, written about his beloved wife who was dying.
Cremation
It nearly cancels my fear of death, my dearest said,
When I think of cremation. To rot in the earth
Is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flame – besides, I
am used to it,
I have flamed with love or fury so often in my life,
No wonder my body is tired, no wonder it is dying.
We had great joy of my body. Scatter the ashes.
- There is an absolute joy in books which those who hardly read cannot fathom. Richard de Bury, Bishop of Durham and treasurer and chancellor of King Edward II of England in the 13th century, loved and collected books with a passion: “In books,” he wrote, “I find the dead as if they were alive; in books I foresee things to come; in books warlike affairs are set forth; from books come forth the laws of peace. All things are corrupted and decay in time; Saturn ceases not to devour the children that he generates: all the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.”
Six centuries later Virginia Woolf understood his passion and described a similar love of books: “I have sometimes dreamt,” she wrote, “that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, ‘Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.’”
- I like the following poem which in a few quiet lines takes a wry look at the pretensions of the powerful. Nobody should take themselves too seriously, especially politicians and especially politicians in power over us. The poem was written a thousand years ago by the Chinese poet Su Tung-Fo (1036-1101). Prime Minister Harold Macmillan of Great Britain used to read it out every now and then at his cabinet meetings.
On The Birth of His Son
Families when a child is born
Want it to be intelligent.
I through intelligence
Having wrecked my whole life
Only hope the baby will prove ignorant and stupid
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister.
- The American Jack Gilbert is one of my favourite poets. I discovered a very short poem of his which I like a lot.
It condenses into a few lines an ambition which does not fly too high but high enough to catch the last rays of the setting sun of life.
Convalescing
I spend the days deciding
on a commemorative poem.
Not, luckily, an epitaph.
A quieter poem
to establish the fact of me.
As one of the incidental faces
in those stone processions.
Carefully done.
Not claiming that I was
at any of the great victories.
But that I volunteered.
