This week another poem by the to my mind much neglected E.J.Scovell (see also weeks 91, 503 and 540). It is easy to understand why Joy’s voice is not more celebrated. Her poems are unfashionably formal. They strike no poses, relying instead on quietly precise observation. Her life she kept private, offering no hook for the journalists of poetry to hang a story on. Well, if her work is only to be kept alive by the love of a few admirers scattered through time, so be it.

Quite a number of her poems reflect her experience on the Home Front during the Second World War. This is one of them, a poem of unostentatious compassion perfectly rounded off by the image of bereft love in the last two lines.

A Refugee

My heart had learnt the habit of earthly life
In an accustomed place.
My voice had learnt the habit of maternal
Sharpness and gentleness.

My thighs had learnt the speech of love. The house
And market tasks that show
So small a flower, rooting in hands and feet
Had matted my flesh through.

My husband died in the mercy of Russian snow.
My child died in the train,
In three days in the weeping cattle truck
From Breslau to Berlin.

I was not taught the song of extremity,
The dancing of duress.
All that I know of infinite is the intensity
Of finite tenderness.

All that I have of goodness is through love –
Their love my only worth.
My rigid arms set in the shape of their love
Have no more use on earth.

E.J.Scovell

This little poem by Edith Scovell (1907-1999; see also weeks 91 and 503) is perhaps most likely to appeal most to those of a certain age, like myself, who see their family, friends and ex-colleagues dying off at a rather alarming rate around them, but who are consequently all the more inclined to find a wistful consolation in the continual arrival of new faces on the stage. In the words of the Old Shepherd in ‘The Winter’s Tale’: ‘Heavy matters, heavy matters. But look thee here, boy. Now bless thyself: thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born’.

To An Infant Grandchild

Dear Katherine, your future
Can never meet my past.
So short our common frontier,
Our hinterlands so vast.

Yet at the customs post
Light airs pass freely over
And all we need to know
We know of one another.

Though day will wake your country
As dark flows over mine
Your outback sleeps in shadow now,
Your smile is cloudless dawn.

E.J.Scovell

For me, this love poem by the English poet Edith Joy Scovell (1907-1999) more than makes up in resonance for what it lacks in length.

Alone

Nothing will fill the salt caves our youth wore:
Happiness later, nor a house with corn
Ripe to its walls and open door.
We filtered through to sky and flowed into
A pit full of stars; so we are each alone.
Even in this being alone I meet with you.

E.J.Scovell