Two poems of loss and regret.

Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae  . . . Ernest Dowson.   Don't be put off by the title . . . the poem ain't in Latin. How many song, film and book titles has this heartbroken poem been responsible for?

This is to Let You Know . . .  by . . . It'll surprise you if you don't know!  It was a hard job finding a print version of this poem.  The link here takes you to a blogged copy of it.  The Doc first came across it on BBC Radio 4 "Poetry Please".  You'll find plenty of "settings to music" of it on www, usually Death to a Poem!  But not as fatal as the truly dreadful settings of the Dowson poem above . . 

Two poems that perfectly capture "moments out of time"


"Stopping by woods . . . "  Robert Frost.   The last stanza so well known it was quoted inter alia by John F. Kennedy. Note the repeated last line.  Is it possible that Lawrence Durrell's use of  this device in several of his (sadly neglected) poems was a homage to Frost?


"Adlestrop."  Edward Thomas      You old enough to remember branch-line steam trains that stopped at every hen-house along the way?   If not, this lovely little poem could be quite lost on you.

Serenade For Tuba

This poem is at present linked back from the POETRY PANTRY.

Poetry Pantry provides opportunity for poets to let others see their earlier work.  This was my first ever published poem, appearing in the mid-70's in the Carcanet Press "Scottish Poetry 8"

SERENADE FOR TUBA

  Come up and greet my jolly, golden solace.

Through here! She voices best in gurgling bathrooms.

Stroke - she won't bite - her close coiled, shining cloisters . . .

A gin-crazed plumber, in to fix the ball-cock

swooned when his gaze rolled round those crotcheted pipings . .

Your smile leers massive, from burnished haunch reflected.

Fondle her foghorn face. I think she likes you.

Sit! Sit! I'll clasp her close and get her going.

I fell for her, my hippo, in a junk-shop.

She squatted, three-pound-ten, a chubby bargain.

A friendly welder patched one tattered buttock.

Ignore choleric thumps from upstairs neighbours.

My rondos resonating with their windows

enrage her cat which claws his potted cacti.

Ex-R.A.F., his tracer drills my ceiling.

Give him his way, he'd melt her down for bullets.

Have suitors, faint as simpering glockenspiels

stitched frills to hot-eyed love with lace flutes needling,

entombed their caverned lusts in lowing cellos,

or scraped and sidled with seductive fiddles?

I, triple-tongued and three crooked fingers pumping,

lip firm with lung in heartfelt syncopation

will plight a fat-cheeked troth that shakes the sternum.

Our mammoth blasts bring hearts' defences tumbling.

Lips purse. Trial puffs fan distant, dripping cellars.

Stirred echoes faintly wander spiralled sewers . . .

(This melancholy mastodon of music

fair uses up the Brasso, I can tell you.)

Now eggs of sorrow in her tin bowels hatching

trundle her ghostly, subterranean gloamings,

soar to the flaring spaces of her belfry.

And OOMPAH roars its challenge to despair.