The Bridge by Edward Thomas

I have come a long way to-day:
On a strange bridge alone,
Remembering friends, old friends,
I rest, without smile or moan,
As they remember me without smile or moan.

All are behind, the kind
And the unkind too, no more
To-night than a dream. The stream
Runs softly yet drowns the Past,
The dark-lit stream has drowned the Future and the Past.

No traveller has rest more blest
Than this moment brief between
Two lives, when the Night's first lights
And shades hide what has never been,
Things goodlier, lovelier, dearer, than will be or have been.

Jodrell Bank by Patric Dickinson

Who were they, what lonely men
Imposed on the fact of night
The fiction of constellations
And made commensurable
The distances between
Themselves, their loves, and their doubt
Of governments and nations?
Who made the dark stable

When the light was not? Now
We receive the blind codes
Of spaces beyond the span
Of our myths, and a long dead star
May only echo how
There are no loves nor gods
Men can invent to explain
How lonely all men are.

THE OLYMPIC GIRL by John Betjeman

The sort of girl I like to see
Smiles down from her great height at me.
She stands in strong, athletic pose
And wrinkles her retroussé nose.
Is it distaste that makes her frown,
So furious and freckled, down
On an unhealthy worm like me?
Or am I what she likes to see?
I do not know, though much I care,
xxxxxxxx…..would I were
(Forgive me, shade of Rupert Brooke)
An object fit to claim her look.
Oh! would I were her racket press'd
With hard excitement to her breast
And swished into the sunlit air
Arm-high above her tousled hair,
And banged against the bounding ball
"Oh! Plung!" my tauten'd strings would call,
"Oh! Plung! my darling, break my strings
For you I will do brilliant things."
And when the match is over, I
Would flop beside you, hear you sigh;
And then with what supreme caress,
You'd tuck me up into my press.
Fair tigress of the tennis courts,
So short in sleeve and strong in shorts,
Little, alas, to you I mean,
For I am bald and old and green.

Late Fragment – Raymond Carver

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver


This is the fourth and final poem from our guest editor.  He writes:  Raymond carver died relatively young of lung cancer. This very short poem says what was very important to him in his life – not wealth, or fame not even health, but to be beloved. I am extremely fortunate that I love and am beloved.

Song – William Wordsworth

Song

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
A Violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the Eye!
- Fair, as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky!
She lived  unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her Grave, and Oh!
The difference to me.

William Wordsworth


Our guest editor writes:  This poem is very simple but very powerful. It was especially important to me after the death of a much beloved member of our family. She may not have been very important to many people, may not even have been really noticed,  but when she was not there anymore – Oh! The difference to my wife and me.

Sonnet 29 – William Shakespeare

I must include something by William Shakespeare in my choice. This sonnet I find particularly moving. Sometimes, when I am feeling low, the last five lines become especially true and important.

Sonnet 29

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

 William Shakespeare

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer – John Keats

From time to time we have a guest editor.  The next four weeks’ poems are from our second guest editor, who has chosen to remain anonymous.  He writes:

 “I have enjoyed reading poems for years and have gained a lot from many of them. The poems I have chosen, which appear over the next four weeks, are very dear to me and express some of my important feelings perfectly.

 This is the first poem I really remember reading and the first, of very few, I have memorised. Particularly important to me are the last six lines. There have been a few occasions in my life when I felt I have seen a new planet and there have been two ‘Cortez moments’ when a really awesome, wonderful event has occurred."

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific - and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 John Keats