22nd August 2021

 

Finish every day and be done with it.

You have done what you could.

Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt, crept in.

Forget them as soon as you can, 

tomorrow is a new day;

begin it well and serenely,

with too high a spirit to be cumbered 

with your old nonsense.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

What to write about on this Sunday morning which will not be about current news.  I thumb through my blog posts, this time on Waldo's poem and become immersed in other things.  For a start Geoffrey Grigson scholarly and intellectual essay on Stonehenge to be read on this link. .  https://www.historytoday.com/archive/stonehenge-and-imagination

I find photos of Lucy asleep on the sofa, of Paul cooking the Sunday breakfast, which took at least an hour of gentle frying  but i could not find the photo of Green Eyes as a kitten, peering seriously over the church wall as she contemplated our lives from her feral overview.

Read yesterday of three old feral tomcats in Amotherby, never been caught, ill and badly fed but still surviving to spread their  progeny.  Green Eyes now lives in a barn in Slingsby with two other cats, her future assured hopefully.

So what about the poem.   I came across Waldo Williams on a drive to the Presceli hills, his memorial plaque on a bluestone, across the lane from it is a another bluestone commemorating the time when a bluestone was taken from the top by helicopter, was the stone used for Waldo I wonder? If Grigson had been writing the present day history of the 'tunnel' to be built next to Stonehenge to take all the traffic and all the 'findings' of the original quarry from which the bluestones came from, he would have calmly laid it by all the famous people who had once speculated on the building and written it down as history in the making.

Williams reminds me of that other morose Welsh poet - R.S. Thomas and on reading the Wiki on him see he is described as the "Solzhenitsyn of Wales because he was such a troubler of the Welsh conscience". He was too put it bluntly bloody miserable but a very good poet.

Those fields – I’ve walked across them - they are
Extraordinary fields, though inaccessible to the seeker
After transcendence this is no loss for the page
Holds them in view and they extend into the margins
Between field hedges and the nets of the Hunter

In many places and times where time
Is arrested and held captive by a tether
Of stillness long enough to feel chastened by silence.
Sunlight touches a wall on a summer afternoon,
Shadows enclose a moment which passes from forever

To forever: Such blessings are felt to be precious.
But hearing beyond them voices calling in a common
Tongue of work and worship echoing through centuries,
And knowing that they witness this moment
When all is still, so that being alone

Is to be with them, resonates beyond solitude.
Voices heard in the echoes of whistling lapwings
Tremble to life over empty meadows; each hand,
Each tongue unique in the passing of time yet fused
In a moment making one of many things.

Waldo Williams

Presceli Mountains