September 2023 – Let there be light

Our investigation of light and dark began with Dylan Thomas’s stirring villanelle ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.

WH Auden’s ‘On this island’ has an unusual and approximate scheme of rhyme and rhythm, and a puzzling text. Who is the stranger invited to ‘look… at this island’, and why is the view, illuminated by ‘leaping light’, mainly out to sea?

Light is a frequent concern of the American poet Diane Wakoski. We heard a recording of her reading ‘Light’; maybe morning sunlight, by which she reads in the bath.

In Sylvia Plath’s painful ‘The moon and the yew tree’, ‘this (presumably the moon) is ‘the light of the mind, cold and planetary’.

In two readings from TS Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’, East Coker section I has images of sunset and firelight, while section III is emphatically concerned with darkness.

Liz Lochhead’s ‘The bargain’ vividly conjures up a Glasgow street market on a cold January afternoon with ‘dark coming early’ at packing-up time. Edwin Morgan’s ‘Night pillion’ also features the geography of that city.

Yorkshire poet Eithne Longstaff’s tender ‘My wife, sewing at a window’ was the artist’s choice in rattle.com’s August 2023 ekphrastic challenge. The poem cleverly relates several instances of light in paintings. Charlotte Mew’s ‘Ken’ likewise features different instances of light and dark including the blaze of church candles, which also occur in Wilfred Owen’s angry sonnet ‘Anthem for doomed youth’, along with the dark of drawn- down blinds. Editor of Owen’s poems, Jon Stallworthy, gives us the striking image that ‘A poem is…’ akin to light from a distant star.

‘A poem for pea sea users’ was read as an appetiser before the splendid Brian Bilston’s ‘Love poem, written in haste, with Autocorrect on’. Neither mentions light or dark, but both are pieces of light verse, certainly. The former appears to exist in many versions, mostly anonymous but one, attributed to Jerrold H Zar, has the splendid title ‘Candidate for a pullet surprise’.

William Blake’s ‘The ecchoing green’ takes us through the day from sunrise to darkening evening, when Thomas Grey’s ‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’ takes over; we had the first four stanzas. As the light fails, the wood in Robert Frost’s ‘Come in’ becomes forbiddingly dark and the poet prefers to stay clear and enjoy the stars. This poem inevitably brought to mind Hardy’s ‘The darkling thrush’, which however we didn’t get round to. Edward Thomas’s ‘The combe’ is dark at all hours, and more so since a badger was killed there. The same poet’s ‘Cock crow’ brings us around again to dawn, in a high-flown classical style though with a surprising bathetic ending.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘I woke and felt’ from the Dark Sonnets describes a dark night of the soul, where the light of morning brings no consolation.

Ken Gambles’ ‘Depths’ uses an unusual metrical form and irregular internal rhyming to take us from freedom via laughter and music to deepest threatening darkness.

Charles Dickens’ description of Coketown from the novel ‘Hard Times’ is a prose poem evoking a grim scene darkened by smoke, penetrated by the light of industrial furnaces.

In contrast to these we had WB Yeats’ charming and romantic ‘He wishes for the cloths of heaven’ – shedding their golden and silver light.

We closed, as if at evensong, with the Third Collect for evening prayer from the Book of Common Prayer, ‘Lighten our darkness…’, before we went out into the perils and dangers of the night.