All day, while out beyond these five-act walls,
where 'the readiness is all', sun blazoned in leaf
or rain spattered panes
('What do you read...?
Words, words, words.')
or wind made quite ready
to blow the ivied place away with the plum blossom
and the wuthering willows, the tossing lilac,
to blow startling blue alkanet
(among dark nettles
who mean business)
and forget-me-nots up
for lawn-replacement,
competing for dapple,
new conurbation of Alexanders by sullen sheds,
all to be tumbled off
with a De La Mare leer,
I paced the carpet to the vinyl and back again
and did 'the police in different voices', a troupe
of declaimers, name of 'Legion',
fit for the very Divil
or for JC's grand rebukes in 'Paradise Regained'.
I spoke the very world in Babel of poetic forms,
registers, many dead jostling with few yet living,
many Englishes from Yorkshire dales to Oxford towers,
all from a mere one meter of bookshelf.
Jinns
out of the bottle, full of bottle, lost their bottle,
bottled out, selected or put back to be cleared.
Let them have that paltry essay of Michael Schmidt,
who is deaf to the Blam, blam, blam! of W. Owen's
'blind, blunt bullet heads.'
'Insistent alliteration'
he calls tinnitus in's hatchet ears, deludes a sneer.
Michael-Anton Schmidt-Ego. Go eat ratatatouille!
To think I came with Auden, Yeats and Donne;
and Finnegan's Wake stowed in my laptop-case,
and now the Wake's got out in English voice,
like Weave-worlds spread about the couch beneath
the bookcase, yes -
but wind will blow them through
deep subspace corridors, with Voyagers, to eternity.
................
The literary references, not directly to do with the many volumes of poems I was sampling, begin with Hamlet act 5, scene 2 - Hamlet:... 'the readiness is all.' Hamlet is ready for the showdown and finality.
And then act 2, scene two - Polonius: 'What do you read...?' Hamlet: Words, words, words.'
Alexanders are green, umbellifer plants - maybe they are great conquerors of disused gardens hereabouts.
Walter De La Mare wrote plenty of magical and eerie stuff.
'He do the police in different voices' is a quote from Charles Dickens' 'Our Mutual friend where one Sloppy, an orphan is introduced as 'a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the police in different voices.' This was used by T.S.Eliot in The Wasteland as a subtitle indicating Eliot's taking on different voices and roles in society through the poem, sometimes changing seamlessly.
'Anton Ego' is the Parisian restaurant critic in the children's fantasy/animal film 'Ratatouille'. 'Go eat ratatatouille = (in the poem's context) eat lead ;)
'Weaveword' is a fantasy novel by Clive Barker.
'Voyager' flies in a 'Star-Trek Universe' which involves 'subspace corridors'.
Oh. The title is a play on Millon's reagent which tests for proteins. I am testing for just what grabs me in the verse.
YOU ARE READING
The Singing Season
PoetryThe Singing Season. That's the spring-time. You'll also like other MajorSeventh poetry collections - and there are so many to choose from.
