Nola picked up a copy of The Economist today, and read bits of it to me while I fixed supper. She happened on the obituary page, which this week celebrates the life of Charles Causley, the Cornish poet, who died this last November 4th.
It caught our ears, especially this quote from Recruiting Drive:
- Under the willow the willow
- I heard the butcher bird sing,
- Come out you fine young fellow
- From under your mother's wing...
- You must take off your clothes for the doctor
- And stand as straight as a pin,
- His hand of stone on your white breastbone
- Where the bullets all go in.
So we went hunting for more of his poetry online:
There's one reproduction of his I Am The Song that is formatted so appallingly I couldn't bear to link it (I Am A Snob), so here it is:
- I am the song that sings the bird.
- I am the leaf that grows the land.
- I am the tide that moves the moon.
- I am the stream that halts the sand.
- I am the cloud that drives the storm.
- I am the earth that lights the sun.
- I am the fire that strikes the stone.
- I am the clay that shapes the hand.
- I am the word that speaks the man.
In her recent article on his life and work, his friend Susan Hill ends with this:
Shortly after receiving the Heywood Hill prize, he was made a Companion of Literature by the Royal Society of Literature, a rare honour, and asked me, again, to accept on his behalf. "What would you like me to say?" I asked.
The reply might well have been: "What an honour." Or perhaps, "What a surprise..."
But our greatest living poet, aged 83, asked me to say, "My goodness, what an encouragement."
5 Comments
Thanks so much for this info — I really enjoy finding out about wonderful people I’ve never previously heard of. His comment, “My goodness, what an encouragement” seems such a perfect summary of his character. Delightful!
That poem _I Am the Song_ is just wonderful. Thanks for sharing it!
It’s an unexpected joy, isn’t it, for such people to come to one’s notice. It makes me feel as if I’d been living under a rock, or been an earthworm nosing about through my own bit of dirt, not seeing anything else till it’s set right in front of me.
The “I Am A Song” clarified for me how much of the time, when I’m making something, it is making me. How I twist and scrunch up my body around the work itself, while it is simply there, incomplete, but entirely there. And at the end of each session, cold and stiff, I unfold and stretch and pop my knuckles and trudge inside, and after a while, after many sessions, I’ve new callouses and muscles and a different way of holding a pencil or a knife.
Remarkable – I read the same Economist obituary as I was racing across the Austro-Hungarian in a train, and was taken by the lyrical aesthetics Causley, and I think the beautiful Magyar two rows down noted the pleasure I, and my tongue took in repeating the lines of ‘Recruiting Drive.’
In fact, I’m going to the library right now to find a book of Causley’s.
I recommend you pick up a nice single-malt on the way home to go along with it.