Our April 2021 meeting considered ‘House and home’.
Wallace Stevens’ “Postcard from the Volcano” speaks of the walls of a house retaining ghosts of the conversations of its one-time occupants, while Philip Larkin’s “Home is so sad” highlights the poignancy of furnishings without their one-time owner – ideas that have inspired many poems about houses.
In Thomas Hardy’s “On one who lived and died where he was born”, the same stairs frame a whole life from the new-born baby’s first descent. The baby in Thom Gunn’s “Baby song” longs to return to the womb room. And displaced from her home by war, the 13-year-old Amineh Abou Kerech wrote her “Lament for Syria”; a remarkably assured – and prize-winning – evocation of her feelings about the country she left. If only, like Miroslav Holub in “Fairy tale”, she could have magically pocketed her house and garden when she set out into the wide world.
Louis MacNeice’s “House on a cliff” is home to an enigmatic troubled man. The same poet’s “Snow” sets off a reflection on the wonder of the world when snow is seen separated only by the window glass from a vase of roses in a cosy room. In Charlotte Mew’s “The Call” however, the cosiness is terminally disrupted by a fateful caller. Her “From a window” is also an intimation of what we leave behind after death, and how life goes on without us. But in her “Rooms”, the speaker seems to be enduring a living death.
More optimistically, George Mackay Brown’s “The finished house” is consecrated by the community with rites and gifts. In Emily Dickinson’s “The props assist the house”, the finished house is strikingly likened to a human soul once the scaffolding of life is removed.
Tony Harrison in “Long Distance 2” recalls his father continuing as if his wife had not died, while Robert Hayden in “Those Winter Sundays” realises that his father expressed his love of family in chores rather than affection. In Charles Causley’s “Forbidden Games” the poet recalls playing snakes and ladders by himself and being told his father had gone to be ‘with the angels’.
“In the room of the bride-elect” (Thomas Hardy) the silly girl accuses her parents of not persuading her out of her choice of husband. Perhaps the one she preferred was the protagonist in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”, the jilted lover who now thinks of ‘mating with a squalid savage’.
Ken Gambles’ “School Triptych” evokes three momentary memories from a classroom.
Robert Frost’s “Mending wall” gives us a picture of rural life and a philosophical discussion about boundaries.
We also heard Paul Henry’s “Retired”.
Ken Gambles read ‘Hawthorns”, his response to the previous month’s challenge to write a ‘tree’ poem, which can be read elsewhere on this site along with other entries.