We had the first frost of the year the other morning. I love a hard frost, so clean and bright after unmemorable November days of rain and muck. It prompted me to dig out this poem of mine, to which there is a tale. When it first appeared in one of my collections one reviewer was kind enough to single it out for praise as a particularly fine sonnet. Sonnet? I looked at it. I counted the lines. Yep, fourteen. And the rhymes seemed to be in the right place. Well, well, so it was. I was rather impressed with myself. I had as usual just let the poem take the form it seemed to want to take, and had simply not noticed that this particular form had a name. I still can’t decide whether to write a sonnet by accident shows genius or a distressing lack of formal awareness. Naturally I incline to the former view…

Worm-hole: the reference is to the cosmologists’ speculation that there might be passages connecting one universe to another. In this case connecting our universe to a universe of joy and wonder, which is perhaps just our own seen with new eyes.

Fern-seed: as well as being very small, fern-seed (more properly fern spores) was thought in mediaeval times to have magical properties, enabling one to become invisible, see into the future, and stay forever young. Cf. Shakespeare’s ‘Henry IV’: ‘we have the receipt of fern seed; we walk invisible’.

From The Train

From the train at dawn, on ploughland, frost
Blue-white in the shadow of a wood.
Oh, you again, of all moods soonest lost
And most elusive and least understood.
What should I call you? Vision? Empathy?
Elation’s tunnel? Worm-hole of rejoicing?
Some bliss of childhood, reasonless and free,
The secret microcosms … What a thing
To have no name for, yet to live for, these
Curious contentments under all,
These moments of a planet: weathers, trees –
What dreams, what intimations, fern-seed small,
Are buried in my days, that I must find,
And recognise, and lose, and leave behind?

David Sutton

There is a famous passage in the writings of the physicist Richard Feynman in which he takes issue with poets for their perceived lack of engagement with the realities of science: ‘Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination — stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern — of which I am a part…. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvellous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?’

This is characteristically eloquent, but also, I feel, a bit wrong-headed. I am sure that many poets are, as I am, deeply interested in the wondrous adventures of modern astronomy, but I don’t think Feynman had much understanding of the way poetic inspiration works. Real poems do not come about by poets sitting down and saying to themselves ‘Ah, time I wrote a poem about what Jupiter is really like’. It’s more a matter of having a voice in your head that suddenly says to you ‘Oi! You! Listen up…’ and what that voice says is unpredictable and depends on what, at the deepest level of your being, you are emotionally invested in. And fascinating though an immense sphere of methane and ammonia may be, it is quite hard to be emotionally invested in it. Or to put it another way, W.B.Yeats once said that out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric, out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. I think that is very true, and I find it difficult to see how Jupiter can form part of the quarrel with ourselves.

For what it’s worth, here’s one of my own poems on a cosmological theme, that nonetheless remains stubbornly rooted in the human. I don’t think Feynman would approve and yet, for better or worse, it’s what we project on to the universe that we relate to, not what the universe really is.

Cosmologies

‘If you could just keep going in a straight line’ –
Said my father, innocent of Einstein,
As we walked home one night of winter stars –
‘You’d come at last to somewhere where there was
Nothing at all. I mean, there has to be
A last star, and what then?’ This troubled me.
That night in bed I travelled in my mind
Through stars that whirled like snowflakes in the wind
Until I found, beyond one last faint glow,
A blank, like morning fog outside my window.
I woke and cried, but when my father came
To ask what ailed me, was it some old dream,
Sobbed ‘Nothing!’, so was left to sleep again
Like the blind Cyclops in his cave of pain.

Later I learned: my father had it wrong:
All lines bend back at last, however long.
There is no end to the great blizzard of light
I’d like to tell him now, and so I might
Had he not journeyed on, to somewhere far
Beyond all words of mine, and any star.

David Sutton

My eighty-first birthday this week. Ran my birthday mile in 8 minutes 27 seconds – disappointing but at least that’s ten seconds faster than last year’s pathetic effort. Extrapolating this improvement in a way that some may find questionable, I calculate that I should be down to a respectable four minutes by the time I am a hundred and eight. Watch this space.

Meanwhile I thought that as it’s my birthday week I might be excused for offering a poem of my own, a meditation on what is lost with age, and what can still be kept.

Journal

I write in my journal, ‘Thrushes in the lane,
A soft wind, and the blackthorn petals falling.’
There would have been much more when I was young:
Each scent of earth, each bird and flower of spring,
But youth is gone, I cannot visit again
The adventure of the blackbird’s first song.

And once, I might have wanted to share such words
But now it seems enough that they are for me,
And in time, if time allows, will quicken this day,
Since love, in the end, needs little for memory,
But makes of petals, soft winds, singing birds,
Its momentary, everlasting stay.

David Sutton

It has been a cold grey couple of months, though snowless our way, but as I write there are actually gleams of sun, so I am hoping this one of my own might prove timely and strike a few chords with fellow spring watchers.

Blackthorn Day

A western wind, sudden and soft as May,
Long looked for yet amazing: perfect spring,
The year’s first windflowers, blossom in the wood,
The new air tart with nettle-growth and dung.
A day like hope: how quickly we forget
The soul’s long winter, when the sleet winds blew.
We surface now like dolphins into light.
To wait time out seems all we had to do.

It will not last, of course: we shall awake
To ordinary greyness and the rain.
So be it then: I would not wish a world
Unseasoned by such sweet recurring pain
Nor ask a heaven, that had no escape
From cloudless summers of eternal now
To mortal spring again, and blackthorn hope
For one day only, perfect on the bough.

David Sutton

October is the peak month for fungi in our local beechwoods, and it seems to be a good year for them, though like everything else in the natural world their abundance and variety are not what they were, and I have seen nothing since to equal one October afternoon back in the early nineteen-eighties that inspired the following poem of mine, when every stump, trunk and fallen log seemed to be covered with fantastic excrescences.

My mycological interest has just been rekindled by reading two excellent books on the subject, ‘Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind’ by Richard Fortey and ‘Entangled Life’ by Merlin Sheldrake. The former is entertainingly anecdotal and concerned mainly with the visible fruiting bodies that we think of as the fungi, the latter more concerned with the role of fungi, and particularly their mycelia (the normally hidden underground parts), in the ecology as a whole. Both highly recommended.

October Fungi

They are back again, the people of the woods,
A travelling circus of freaks: they have pitched their camp
On meadows of moss between the boles of beeches.
There’s no concealment here: they loll on stumps
In sulphur tribes or swagger in the leaves
Scarlet as outlaws. Fear is in their names:
Destroying Angel, Deathcap, Sickener.
The darkness bred them, devilry’s their lore
And parody their style. There’s Dryad’s Saddle
Perched, a monstrous butterfly of leather;
This velvet sleek translucence is Jew’s Ear,
There’s blewit’s ghostly lilac, polypores
Rubber-tough or textured like meringue,
Smelling of peach and honey. So we meet
Towards another year’s end in the woods.
What shall I say to you, gay-sinister
Consorts of corruption? Welcome, life.
The slugs have gorged themselves on stinkhorn jelly
And here’s a puffball ready to explode,
A wrinkled cerebellum, parchment-yellow,
A rotted sack of flour that splits and spills.
The spores rise up, dream-delicate, like smoke.
They glint and dwindle down the shining air.

David Sutton

My wife and I celebrate our wedding anniversary next week, making fifty-eight in all, of which over the years I have managed to remember fifty-seven. Which is surely a pretty impressive record, though you wouldn’t think so to hear some people go on about it. So, this week I offer one of my own poems on the subject of long-married love, which I wrote a while back, but which I am glad to say is still just as applicable.

Acceptance

We stop at the garden centre for tea and cake,
Our time our own now, all the children gone,
And you talk to another couple at the next table
While I half-drowse in late October sun,
Answering your smiles on cue, but thinking
This is not me, not yet, or not today:
I am not ready for the small contentments,
Though what I want instead is hard to say.

Our forty years again, of toil and trial?
Indeed, if strength came with them to endure
All that love asks, the given and the taken,
But we have come where only loss is sure,
So I must learn new lines, an awkward actor
Who thought to have no part in age’s play.
Rehearse me, then, in love’s last role, acceptance.
Above all, till the final curtain, stay.

David Sutton

We recently had an unusual visitor to our front door, where it clung for hours: this beautiful Lime Hawkmoth. I’m afraid my attempt at a photo doesn’t really do justice to it: the dark patches should be blacker, the green more vivid. It reminded me that I had once written a poem about moth names, which I find fascinating for their idiosyncratic poetry. They are not folk-names – since, unlike plants, Lepidoptera are not obviously useful the common folk never seem to have had much interest in differentiating and naming moths and the vernacular names are the invention of various gentleman naturalists who began to emerge in the eighteenth century: the full story can be found in Peter Marren’s very readable book ‘Emperors, Admirals and Chimney Sweepers’.

In the first five stanzas of my poem I imagine one of those early naturalists speaking in answer to someone who has hailed him as a poet, and modestly disclaiming the title. The remaining three stanzas are my own fanciful elegy for his kind.

‘arms and the man I did not sing’: an allusion to the opening words of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’: ‘Arma virumque cano’, I sing arms and the man.

Naming The Moths

‘You’d call me poet? Hardly, Sir,
         Arms and the man I did not sing,
But once upon an August night
         I named the Yellow Underwing.

‘We found on language’s great map
         A little corner, left all blank.
Such handiwork, without a name!
         (The Maiden’s Blush has me to thank).

‘How I recall that dew-damp eve
         Of honeysuckle-scented June
When first upon the Silver Y
         I set the summons of man’s rune.

‘I see them now, our haunts of old,
         Our hedgerow banks, our woodland glades,
Like memory itself they flit,
         My Early Thorns, my Angle Shades.

‘And some, you say, would honour us?
         Then, Sir, I am obliged to you,
But such was never our intent.
         We did what seemed our own to do.’

Swifts and Ushers, fold your wings
         Softly on the moonlit land.
They who loved you best are gone,
         Walking somewhere, lamp in hand,

Seeking down eternal lanes
         Moths the angels might have missed,
Proffering before the Throne
         ‘Some Amendments to Your List. ‘

Willow Beauty, Burnished Brass,
         China Mark and all the Plumes
With the Footmen gather, dance
         Lightly now above these tombs.

David Sutton

Our wedding anniversary yesterday, and this year for the first time my wife and I agreed not to buy each other cards, given all the hassle with masks, hand sanitisers etc currently attached to going into shops. So I thought the least I could do for my companion of fifty-four years was to dig out this one from my ‘Collected Poems’ and rededicate it to her as some token of recompense for all those times when the process of composition has made me less than usually attentive to her discourse or, as she likes to put it, when I have been away with the fairies.

Against Geologies

Our seconds rain like shells of lime
To build great thicknesses of time:
We watch the secret moments fall
Anonymous beyond recall,
Since who will look for you and me
In those white beds of history?

But if they do, with prying pen
When all our now has turned to then,
Let them not think, because they find
Some particle we left behind,
They know the vanished sea above
That was our salt and sunlit love.

These words I leave for them to learn
Like lily’s stem or print of fern
Are but our shadow in the stone
And all the rest is ours alone.
Then what a world of touch and talk
Shall lie compacted into chalk.

David Sutton