Just one poem from our previous session on colours recurred in this August 2023 session; Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Pied beauty’, an ecstatic celebration of “couple-colour”. Other poets delighting in the natural world were Norman MacCaig in ‘Greenshank’, William Wordsworth in ‘Daffodils’, Walter de la Mare in ‘Silver’, Dylan Thomas in ‘Fern Hill’, WB Yeats in ‘The wild swans at Coole’ and Robert Frost in ‘Nothing gold can stay’. The last three also express a sense of loss as does Orlando Gibbons’ lyric ‘The silver swan’, which concerns the bird’s mythic swan-song.
Sylvia Plath finds ‘Poppies in July’ both dangerous and fascinating.
Helen Dunmore’s ‘Girl in the blue pool’ clearly evokes the atmosphere of a municipal swimming pool – is the girl practising her swimming the poet’s younger self, or her daughter? Another poem dealing with poignant family memories is Anne Carson’s ‘Father’s old blue cardigan’.
We had an extract from ‘Autumn’, part of Ronald Johnson’s ‘The book of the Green Man’ in which this American poet walks through Britain making meticulous observations of things ‘Most rich, most glittering, most strange…’ . Part of Diane Akerman’s prose work ‘A natural history of the senses’ revels in the sensations the natural world offers and she pities – or mocks – people who are too busy to bother with them.
Another poem with a colour in its title was Wendy Cope’s ‘The orange’ in which the loved-up poet finds new delight in everyday things. Edwin Morgan’s ‘Grey’ and Norman MacCaig’s ‘Discolorations’ see through the murk to find some merits in grey weather and cityscapes. Wallace Stevens’s ‘The gray room’ is a setting for various colour highlights and a suggestion of human drama. The same poet’s ‘The blue guitar’ contains many odd images in its considerable length. His ‘Disillusionment of ten o’clock’ is much shorter and amusing; Dr Seuss comes to mind.
‘A red, red rose’ is a simple but telling lyric and we were reminded that Robert Burns didn’t live up to the faithfulness it expresses.
The Irish poet James Stephens’s ‘Blue blood’ is a riotous debunking of pretentious superiority. Apparently it’s a translation from Irish and concerns a Cromwellian Anglo-Irish landowner.
Thomas Hardy’s ‘The pink frock’ is one of his many miniature dramas in verse, describing a very human reaction to tragic circumstances. Another somewhat self-centred girl features in J Milton Hayes’ splendid comic monologue ‘The green eye of the little yellow god’.
Tonia Bowden considered ‘What colour am I?’ . Follow the link to read it on this site.
It is always inspiring and fun to hear Maya Angelou’s ‘I rise’ – the featured colour of course being black.
DJ Enright in ‘Blue umbrellas’ laments the crushing of childish imagination in the schoolroom, speaking of the distance between words and what they try to denote. We heard more about school-days, with reference to two recent deaths; Michael Parkinson apparently said that Barnsley Grammar School (attended by one of our members) was to his education “what myxomatosis was to rabbits”. Carl Davis co-wrote ‘Liverpool Oratorio’ with Paul MacCartney, part of which refers to Macca’s time at the Liverpool Institute (attended by two of our members) and in particular the vividly remembered Spanish lessons of Miss Inkley (in whose name lies the tenuous colour connection).
We wound up fittingly with a performance of Donovan’s popular 1965 song ‘Colours’.