After Edna had gone home,her neighbours Mary and Annie had to vacuum the carpet where Edna had knocked over a box of biscuits of a crumbly nature and then trodden on them
Edna is hard to relate to,said Annie warmly
I wonder if she will get easier as time goes on?
You mean you are going to ask her again?
I’ve not decided,Mary told her.It is a lot of effort in winter.
Suppose she asks us over to her place,Annie wondered
We’ll have to see how we feel.I suppose it would be interesting to look at her furniture and see if she has lots of books,Mary said
If we go and borrow a book, don’t pencil in your comments down the side of the page
As if I would! Mary said indignantly.I only do that to my own
Just sayin’ ,Annie replied
Did you like her purple coat?
I think it doesn’t go with red hair but who cares? I’d wear yellow even if I looked sick
That seem stupid,Mary cried anxiously
In the dark of winter it means drivers can see you.
I suppose so.. yes, quite a wise idea.But one rarely sees a yellow coat in a shop.
I think you can get them in shops that sell sailing gear,Annie mumbled
Since we are right in the middle of England, there are none here.We’ll have to go to
Orford,Mary warned her
Where’s that,Annie asked?
Not far from Aldeburgh,Mary said knowingly
It’s too far to go in a day in winter,Annie decided
How many miles is it?
About 159.468 each way
That is 319.435 miles altogether
So if we go at 60 mph it takes 5.3333 hours
And at 50 mph it takes 6.4 hours
40 mph would be 8 hours
10 mph would take 32 hours
2 mph would be 160 hours

Stop, stop!

at 0.5 mph I tbink it’s 640 hours

Well that is that.We can’t go it would be nearly 24 days nonstop or 48 if we stopped for sleep daily

Just get a black coat and wear a yellow hat

We must face up to things or lose our heads

Why  have eyes and act as if we are blind

That is what I thought the parson said

When I heard my body turned to lead

An accidental change made by design

We must face up to things or lose our heads

Without a head where would we put our minds?

That is what I thought the parson said

I lost my glasses lying on your bed

Were they stolen by a man malign?

We must face up to things or lose our heads

I saw God in the hallway looking red

He lost his son and so  cut short his reign

Love is what I thought the parson said.

There is no part of life without its pain

I often. wonder why god gave us brains

We must face up to things while we have heads

Love is always better live or dead

Snow clouds hang like canopies forlorn,
Tinged with grey from lack of proper care,
While from the Channel sing the dread foghorns

Sailors in the night long for new dawn
Fear boats of refugees may still sail there
Snow clouds hang like canopies well torn

A dinghy holds the Saviour lately born
There is no space on earth safe from great fear
From the Channel sigh the families drowned

From maternal space, Jesu is torn
His father holds his arms around those dear
Snow clouds hang, are lacy wings no more

The hearts of British ” natives” have turned sour
Into Jesu’s side we thrust our spears
Tune the channel.Requiems need scores

All lives now, and all of time is here
Do not mistake the song of silent choirs.
Snow clouds hang like canopies forlorn,
While in the Channel, stuttering are the horn

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n23/tom-paulin/entrepreneurship

“Hughes’s prose in his letters is always urgent and compulsive, but there are moments of tender observation, as in a letter to Edna Wholey in 1950, where he says he

heard a commotion in the hedge, and after a while, out trundled a hedgehog, merry as you like, and obviously out for a good time. I thought he might make a jolly companion for an evening so I brought him in. After a while I noticed he had disappeared and later heard a noise just like the sobbing of a little child, but very faint, and it continued for long enough. I traced it to a pile of boxes, and there was my comrade, with his nose pressed in a pool of tears, and his face all wet, and snivelling and snuffling his heart out. I could have kissed him for compassion. I don’t know why I’m so sympathetic towards hedgehogs.

Such moments are like dummy runs for poems, and they remind us of the animist tenderness in Hughes’s writing, a tenderness that plays against his celebration of feral power. It’s like the last line of a short early poem ‘Snowdrop’ – ‘Her pale head heavy as metal’ – where nature and human artifice come gently together.

Inevitably, though, it is biographical interest that these letters stimulate. We catch Hughes’s early undergraduate life at Cambridge in 1952, when, writing to his sister, Olwyn, he says that sometimes he thinks Cambridge is ‘wonderful’, at others ‘a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret.’ This sounds very like Lawrence, except for the balancing, divided attitude. Hughes, it’s clear, is the most important writer to emerge from English Nonconformism since Lawrence. Like him Hughes writes to the moment with a voracious intensity. Yet in an unusually assured comment on the Anglican Swift (he was only 22) he tells Olwyn that Swift is the ‘only stylist’. Swift’s excellence is a talent for ‘clarity simplicity and power’ (note the lack of commas as in ‘mud water fire and air’). Swift’s writing is ‘the bedrock from which every writer must start’.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/brexit-britons-poetry-writeapoemaboutbrexit_n_576f87dae4b0dbb1bbbad011

The bus was cancelled so we had to walk
They blamed Eastern Europe   for the pain
I listened to the idle,foolish thought
I fear  it’s Jesus crucified  again.

Is that leap unjustified, my friends?
It seems God’s punishment will never end
He made us  leave the Garden of Delight
Even though we’re English and quite white
We blamed the blacks and women  and the Jews
Yet mother’s breast was emptied and abject
Look upon the world we may have wrecked
Get to work and sweat and toil  all day
Mathematics, war and bombs  shall prey
To gain salvation we must  love and work
Life is hard and often it will hurt
Acceptance is  survival   and remorse
Jesus came  without the use of force

I didn’t know I’d love you
With both my heart and mind
Every love is different
Each is a special kind

I didn’t know I’d miss you
In quite the way I do.
For we can’t feel emotion
Before its time is due.

Yet all human lovers
Must part and go their ways.
Some may die and fall to dust
Some may go astray.

I didn’t know I’d miss you
With all my tender heart.
But .as we’re made of fragile flesh.
We all must sadly part.

I should be grateful
For being found and known.
I wish you were still sitting here.
And I were not alone.

When we feel so lonely
No-one else will do.
It’s not that I’m just lonely.
I’m lonely, just for you.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-difference-between-officious-and-official

Only learn nonsense if it’s written by Lewis Carroll

When we were at school some of us came across a little geometry probably concerning triangles squares circles etc and I learned something valuable not from the teacher but from the other girls when we were 16 years old.

We had spent a long time studying Pythagoras’ theorem

And when we sat our O level exam  one of the questions was to prove Pythagorasy theorem for which they kindly provided a triangle

The triangle had three points labeled A,B,C.

So I thought that’s an easy question when you spent probably two or four weeks studying this theorem

After the examination was over I was talking to some of my friends and one of them said to me I couldn’t prove pythagoas theorem.

Because in the textbook it was labeled

X,Y,Z

Maybe I was naive to think that the proof did not depend on the letters that we used to denote the points of the triangle.

This was the A stream in a  convent grammar school.

So everybody must have had an IQ above 120 if that means anything which I don’t believe it does by the way. IQ is not really very significant or importance which is fortunate because the last time I did a test I got 65 when a hundred is the average.

I think I must be an imbecile how amazing this i managed to get a degree

If several girls { probably more than half the class} were not able to answer the question because they had learnt the answer by memory they did nothing to understand what they were doing.

Furthermore they didn’t know that was not the right way to learn. They believed studying was memorizing passages which were nonsense to them or proofs which were nonsense.

So it just makes me wonder just how useful education is to most of us

Maybe there’s a problem about dealing with the abstract rather than the concrete.

I never taught geometry so I don’t know what it’s like but I would have thought it’s important to get across to the children or the students that this theorem does not depend on the name you gift the points of the triangle.

It seems obvious to me but perhaps I’m not like other people but I really don’t believe that…… I think people don’t realize that it ought to  make sense and if it doesn’t make sense they have to ask the teacher to explain it again

I have taught at Oxford I have taught at a  polytechnic and I did not find many students who were unable to learn mathematics if it was presented in a sensible way. Even in people who had not done O levels or A levels

But it’s worth remembering that even the cleverest children find geometry quite difficult and do not grasp what is important about it.

And it is not just geometry that they are learning by heart in a meaningless manner I think it was apply to a lot of what they learn.

And so it must be that learning and study can be very destructive to the mind. It’s just a way of keeping adolescents off the streets

Never learn nonsense by heart unless it is written by Lewis Carroll

It is not good to learn parrot fashion or to memorize proofs that you don’t understand

So if anyone in your family asks you for help with their homework try to see whether they understand the general principle behind it do not help them to learn proofs by heart when they have no idea what it’s about at all.

I can’t really see why we spent five years in my school to reach the peak of Pythagoras’s theorem

No ok I understand why it takes five years to do o level at arithmetics containing six wonderful things as compound interest and percentages; how could that take five years?

It goes to show that school is a prison in a way to keep children under control.

I recollect that I had done o level arithmetic by the edge of 11 in the primary school working at my own pace.

I’m going to spend 5 years learning it all again

Yes compound interest is quite difficult but if you get a job on your earning money and you want to save you will learn about interest very quickly when you really need to and if you don’t need to it’s very  tedious

Next time, who invented the straight line?

A symbol is a well in which we dig.

To find the holy water we desire.

The light is not apparent at the start

  The  work the heat. the force and then the fire…

We do not have the light to act as guide

Stumbling down the darkness like the mad

And when we stop and stare in our dismay

We do not find  the light for we are sad.

Yet despair itself has merit,makes us pause

The slowing of the mind the heart,the blood

Helps us see the light that  we will praise

Paradoxes, opposites and shades.

Help us learn the world and sing its prayers.

http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/

Extract

Poetry: full of his nature and his visions

Fresh from school and in his early twenties now, I was full of thought, often very abstract thought, longing all the while to be full of images, because I had gone to the art school instead of a university.”—from his memoir Four Years (1887-1891) (1921). The Yeats were now living in London in Bedford Park where Yeats’ aesthetic sensibility was oftentimes offended by the ubiquitous red brick, however their home was the lively gathering place for their many writer and artist friends to discuss politics, religion, literature, and art. Around this time Yeats met George Bernard Shaw and William Ernest Henley, editor of London’s The National Observer who became a friend and mentor. He also met many of the other up-and-coming authors and poets of his generation and writes of one in his memoir “My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous.”(ibid). In the year 1890 he and Ernest Rhys founded the London-based Rhymers Club. Yeats’ pre-Raphaelite inspired The Wanderings of Usheen [Oisin] and other Poems was published in 1889, which included “The Ballad of Moll Magee”, the traditional Irish song “Down By The Salley Gardens” and “The Stolen Child”.

Yeats was often homesick for Ireland, of which his poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” was one of the results,

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Though he visited Sligo almost every summer, he also kept a busy schedule in London: when he was not attending lectures or meetings with the Club, he spent time in the British Museum of Natural History doing research for such collaborations as Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Irish Fairy Tales (1892), and A Book of Irish Verse (1895). He was often shy around women but made the acquaintance of many who became friends including poet Katharine Tynan (1861-1931) and Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891), founder of the Theosophical Society of which Yeats joined in 1888. A year later he met his muse and source of unrequited love; poet, feminist, actress, and revolutionary Maud Gonne (1865-1953).

The Abbey Theatre and Beyond

In 1894 Yeats met friend and patron Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) of Coole Park and thus began their involvement with The Irish Literary Theatre which was founded in 1899 in Dublin. (It would become the Abbey Theatre in 1904). As its chief playwright, one of the first plays to be performed there was Yeats’ Cathleen ni Houlihan, with Gonne in the title role. The Abbey Theatre, also known as the National Theatre of Ireland, opened in December of 1904 and became the flagship for leading Irish playwrights and actors. Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand was one of its first productions. Of his many dramatic and successful works to follow, The Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and The King’s Threshold (1904) are among his best known. When Synge died in 1909 Yeats helped to finish his manuscript for Deirdre of the Sorrows. In 1911 the Abbey Theatre embarked on a tour of the United States.

As a successful poet and playwright now, in 1903 Yeats went on his first lecture tour of the United States, and again in 1914, 1920, and 1932. Yeats and his sisters started the Cuala Press in 1904, which would print over seventy titles by such authors as Ezra Pound, Rabindranath Tagore, Elizabeth Bowen, Jack and John Yeats, and Patrick Kavanagh, before it closed in 1946. At the age of forty-six, in 1911, Yeats met Georgie (George) Hyde Lees (1892-1968) and they married on 20 October, 1917. They had two children; Anne (born 1919) and for whom he wrote “A Prayer for My Daughter”;

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Michael was born on 22 August 1921, for whom Yeats wrote “A Prayer for My Son”;

Bid a strong ghost stand at the head
That my Michael may sleep sound,
Nor cry, nor turn in the bed
Till his morning meal come round;
And may departing twilight keep
All dread afar till morning’s back.

I get out my sewing gear
In the quiet times of life,
When I need to mend the tears,
Torn by stress and strife.

I hold my soul so carefully
And gaze at every part.
I hope that light will come to me
As I wonder how to start,

.I take my needle out
With love thread through its heart,
I scrutinize each inch.
And then I start to stitch.

In the quietness of the night
You heal me all the time
You talk to me in dreams
And I write them down in rhymes.

Another day will come
And more fractures form.
That’s all part of life
Strife ,and mend, and strife.

Keep that cocoon whole,
Till the soul’s completely there.
Then through its love-sewn folds
A butterfly will flare.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/feb/16/how-to-have-better-arguments-social-media-politics-conflict

When a debate becomes volatile and dysfunctional, it’s often because someone in the conversation feels they are not getting the face they deserve. This helps to explain the pervasiveness of bad temper on social media, which can sometimes feel like a status competition in which the currency is attention. On Twitter, Facebook or Instagram, anyone can get likes, retweets or new followers – in theory. But although there are exceptions, it is actually very hard for people who are not already celebrities to build a following. Gulled by the promise of high status, users then get angry when status is denied. Social media appears to give everyone an equal chance of being heard. In reality, it is geared to reward a tiny minority with massive amounts of attention, while the majority has very little. The system is rigged.

The places in between were much too wide

Yet i struggled on until I found

The touch of love, the hands that touched my sides ll

Across the floors the feet of dancers glide

All the time our feet must touch the ground

The spaces in between where much too wide

The touch of love the hands that held my sides

Was this why Jesus was at last betrayed

And in the distance I could hear sweet sounds

The place is in between were much too wide.

And then my feelings rose like one great tide

The suchness of your love, oh hands oh sides

And so onto the crucifix we’re bound

To live with love and pain and to be found

The places in between we’re not too wide

I felt your arms around me side to side

Is feeling low to be admired

Is deepness good, my heart enquired

Superficial’s criticisd

For in the depth love may arise.

When we rise high then we will fall

Like the wheat when rich and tall.

When trodden down it makes our bread

It feeds the soul the heart the head.

All that’s good must be destroyed

Before it finds it’s true employ

Do not fear your death and end

For in the darkness love descends

We become the food of worms

Of Beatles and the things that squirm

But without these creatures there’s no lifel

0pen your heart and feel the knife

From the seabed to the sky

We must live until we die

Then in death we are the food off

From which all new things are conceived

Like the circle we rotate

Life goes on in every state

I wish I’d given up the whole idea

Shakespeare’l muttered as he wrote king Lear.

Who am I to tell folks what to do.?

I’d rather be a cobbler mending shoes..

Who will want to read about bad luck

Choices foolish as the day they struck?

Why not give up thinking of good works.

Who will read the Bible else the Kirk?

I wonder why I taught myself to write

. Instead of having fun with something light.

There’s something other lives inside our soul

Its wishes are quite different from our own.

Giving up the gossip is good news

Giving up the likes and counting views.

The word of someone thoughtful counts far more

1000 views are no more than a score

When the sun is high and bright and strong
We feel that it will always be the same
But when we live on earth we know we’re wrong
And for that darkness we have got a name

Now in England we have lights and screens
We do not fear the dark,the devils’ night
But often in the winter we will dream
Of summer heat and places full of light

The steps at Aldeburgh where we saw the sea
The cliffs at Lyme and Charmouth in the spring
But from such places I dread memory
The pain of loss is hard and no child brings

Now the sky is lilac in the dusk
In creation I find what I trust

Oh, lidded kettle boil me water fast
I cannot live without your heated blast
Your spout is small but perfect for its use
And, as your lid is hinged. it can’t get lost

An electric kettle made by Russell Hobbs
A teapot with a spout and lid with knob
Are what the Britons need in times of storm
If crisis comes, we need tea hot,not warm

I don’t object to diverse kettle brands.
We had a coal fire once with kettle stand.
Its metal black from soot and burned by coke
We made our neighbours tea which seemed to smoke.

Ah,kettle ,instrument of civil life
We cannot boil our water on a knife

Everything good is play: everything creative is play

How I miss my playmate and brother P. And my sister also. 

Still I remember our adventures 

And I remember our  risky games

When our senses are full of vitality and our minds are full of new ideas then life is full like a ripe apple. 

I have eaten of the apple

And I am glad

As poetry itself can’t earn me fl cash

Ill live on sausage meat and buttery mash

I’ll have to take cocaine to get some words

A sentence here and there, a paper charred

What would happen if  the poets went on strike

And  got some other work from their old bikes

Then there’d be a flatness to our talk

. No more  would our words dance, they’d have to walk.

What kind of work could an old poet obtain ?

Could I be a scarecrow in the rain?

Could I be a nurse and help the sick

I could study clocks,how do they tick?

Yet all I have that is unique to me

Is my  own words that flow,the silver sea

And in the sea of words we float with joy

Do not drown but give your words employ

Even were it crime to play with words

The sound of a new rhyme coulf still occur.

What are the words that form our dialogue

Merry bright and free thermse are my drug

I miss the flock of geese by that

once flew by

Making sunlit patterns in

The sky

Everything is still and silent are the birds

The river does not murmur as the geese alight

What of this to capture in my little words

For darkness will come early stealing our eyesight.

Oh,Alfred,my beloved,do not go
Do not leave, but warmth to me bestow,
Lie beside me in my bed all night
Succour me when stormy dreams affright.

Oh,Alfred,-’tis your eyes that turn me on
The green and golden light is never gone.
Affection constant, touch and feeling shared.
I am not embarrassed when you stare.

For you , the gallant male, have often seen
My naked form well lit by Jove’s sunbeams
And if I wear a gown of wincyette
You love it as it’s nice for paws of cat.

Alfred ,we can’t marry yet I fear.
Cats can’t read the Book of Common Prayer.

The story of Mary Hobson

https://www.rbth.com/arts/literature/2016/04/22/learning-russian-has-given-me-a-whole-new-life_587093

Too old for cold,I stand, now ,against the hedge,
Watching the snowflakes in the glare of neon street lights.
Darkness has come early,and I think of country uplands and huddled sheep.
On Salisbury Plain,shepherds watched their flocks
Just as in Bethlehem two thousand years before,
And then,exactly when?
“Between the wars”,it stopped. Now we know there is no “Between the wars”.
And who decided
To cull the sheep and shepherds and the space for kindness ?
Now that same Plain still exists,but banned
And closed to human-kind,
For bombs ,not wombs
Nor for birth of lamb ,nor gypsy child ,nor Saviour
Where would He go today?

?