He Scrawls With Seaweed His Biography

Though I'm not nostalgic about the past as a rule, I'm enjoying sifting through these drawers and boxes full of old poems, photos and family memorabilia. To be more exact, I'm feeling a mixture of pleasure and pain, a kind of uneasy and disquieting fascination.  I always used to say the past is dead, long live the future, but I think I've probably used this strategy to avoid reopening old wounds. The past shapes and informs our present selves whether we choose to recognise it or not.

One thing that's struck me is how much I've changed and yet how much I've remained the same — if that makes any sense. And another thing I've found is how easy it's been been to reenter my adolescent mind through the portal of these early poems. Derivative they may be (I take some comfort in the fact that Philip Larkin's first book of published poems, The North Ship, was enormously derivative), and heart-on-sleeve, and more descriptive of the tormented teenage soul than the objective, observable world, but they are mine. In my twenties they became less ego-drenched, although in this poem am I portraying some mystic madman — or myself?

The Visionary

He is not like us. He reads strange books

Of mystic poetry, mythology.

He walks the beach alone, pausing to look

Beyond the black horizon of the sea

For hidden prizes. (An esoteric script

Revealed to him that all the world's contained

Within one word; yet all the words of men

In the whole world cannot explain the moon,

Heavily hanging above the indifferent ocean,

Which hugs its secrets like an octopus.)

Knowledge of visions, the mind's unreasoning ways

Cram his frail shell of silence till it shatters,

And the volcano of his crazed response

Erupts; its lava fills the darkening air

With symbols, gestures conjuring Atlantis.

He scrawls with seaweed his biography

Elliptically upon the watery rocks

Until the waves erase it; then retreats

From the sea's lacy edge as delicately

As any wader. He hesitates to view

The white-eyed moon; his wild and frenzied face

Avoids her haunting gaze; he cannot bear

Her intimacy and her dreadful distance.

Silent once more, shocked still, he is afraid

Nothing is out there but infinite space,

Dead as driftwood, speechless as the stars.

He fears that he can hear no sound at all

But the incessant clamour in his tight skull.

Bufo Bufo

With all this talk of toads in blogland at present - as instanced by my striking Marianne Moore quote yesterday and Rachel Fox's recent tribute to Philip Larkin - I'm coming round to thinking the common toad has had quite an unfair literary press.

Just consider the most famous literary toad - Mr Toad, Toad of Toad Hall, in Kenneth Grahame's immortal children's book The Wind In The Willows. He's conceited, vain, egotistical, pompous, reckless, lacking in common sense, foppish and insufferably rich - a warty but lovable rogue, a kind of post-Lottery-winning Del Boy of the amphibian world.

Then we have Larkin's famous poem Toads itself, as referenced in the last line of Rachel Fox's poem, Larkin Is Home. Larkin's poem begins: Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life?/Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork/And drive the brute off?/Six days of the week it soils/With its sickening poison -/Just for paying a few bills!/That's out of proportion.

I'm sure most of us have experienced to a greater or lesser extent the desperate tedium of working for a living - but it's a biological fact that the toad's poison neither soils nor sickens. The relatively mild toxin in its skin is of little harm to humans. Indeed, sadly for the toad it's often of little harm either to its chief predators, the grass snake and the hedgehog, who regularly make a meal of poor toad with few harmful after effects. Yet, despite these demands of the food chain, toads may commonly live for 40 years or more if left unmolested.

A far cry from the bombastic creature of Kenneth Grahame's imagination, the toad is actually quite a shy beast, fond of burrowing down into garden compost heaps and quietly retiring there for long periods (please bear this in mind, everyone, when airing your own compost heaps with a fork this spring).

So I make a heartfelt plea for the common toad. Though it has a warty skin, there's no truth in the rumour it can give you warts too. That's an old wives' tale. It won't scare the pants of your nervous wife by leaping up her skirt, as is the tendency of the mercurial frog - toads' legs are shorter, and toads crawl not jump. Have pity on and repect for the humble toad. It's harmless, it's undemanding, it's meditative. It's not going anywhere fast. And it may live longer than you.

Writers and poets - a challenge. How about a pro-toad-ode for a change?

In The Midst Of Life

Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in.

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

PHILIP LARKIN

I don't know if this happens to other bloggers, but I sometimes wake in the middle of the night with whole syntactical chunks of blog ready-formed in my head. And unless I get up at once and write them down, they've vanished into the ether by morning. Occasionally the same thing happens with poems. The bare bones of this one had already coalesced in my mind on waking abruptly at 4am in a tent in Borrowdale a few years ago. I've blogged before about the relationship between sleep and creativity here. This blessed visitation has just occured again tonight.

May and September are my favourite months of the year. Though I've learnt not to have favourite months. Now I like them all. After a certain age you're more conscious of the finite number of Mays and Septembers left. But, if all months become your favourites, then you suddenly have 6 times as many more months to enjoy. I've been reflecting on all this as I'm in a somewhat sombre mood - despite the most beautiful warm weather this week, which coincided with the return of the swifts, screaming and skydancing in the blue bowl of sky overarching the garden. ( ...The swifts/Materialize at the tip of a long scream/Of needle. 'Look! They're back! Look! And they're gone/On a steep/Controlled scream of skid/Round the house-end and away under the cherries... From Swifts by Ted Hughes.) Yes, I've been in an unseasonably reflective mood - more September-ish than May-esque you might say - because I had to attend a funeral yesterday.

I wasn't the only mourner (or thanksgiver as the lady vicar later reminded us) to be completely caught off my emotional guard by the Scottish pipe music being played as we followed the coffin into Lincoln Crematorium. At once my eyes filled and my lips began to tremble. I could barely sing the 1st hymn. In an attempt to control myself, I stared fixedly out of the window at an unfocused spot in the middle distance somewhere between a foreground bush and some trees further out.

Rita. Feisty, generous, cantankerous, chaotic, warm-hearted, strong-willed (no - downright bloody-minded), intelligent, outgoing, outrageous. Courageous too - she'd suffered from ill health all her life: bronchial chest, swollen legs, knackered kidneys, diabetes. She finally gave up smoking, but not the cream cakes, when she retired. Her car had more dents than a tin can used for shotgun practice. She'd nearly died several times. Now she had really gone.

Rita. A one woman band against authority. A tireless fighter against social injustice. Schoolteacher, Area Director of Social Services, local councillor, volunteer worker for STRUT, the Lincoln-based charity providing respite care for children with disabilities and learning difficulties.

Rita. Once her bungalow was burgled. A police officer came round. He surveyed the anarchic destruction in every room. "I'm afraid they've made a bit of a mess, Miss Hodgson," he commiserated. "Nonsense," countered Rita breezily. "They've tidied the place up!"

As the blue curtain closed on the coffin I looked away through the window once more. In the distant trees some magpies, feathered in funereal black and white, lurched from one branch to another. And 2 chaffinches bounced up from the bush in front of the window and fluttered frenziedly up and down the pane, tapping their heads repeatedly, insistently against the glass. Just as if they were trying to gain entrance for some obscure, avian reason. Then, after what seemed an eternity of knocking, and some harsh looks from the lady vicar, they suddenly flew off, disappearing over the Garden of Rest.