Oh my goodness, I feel so emotional having seen today’s google doodle. Anyone who has chanced upon my blog in the past probably came for my art history content; specifically a number of posts about the Pre-Raphaelite model and Muse Fanny Eaton. The posts about Mrs Eaton remain to this day the most read posts on my blog and with good reason.

In my estimation Mrs Eaton is on an equal footing with Elizabeth Siddal as an important model, however unlike the aforementioned, Mrs Eaton has gone pretty much unnoticed until recent times.

The balance was somewhat redressed in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition ‘Pre-Raphaelite Sisters’ exhibition 2019. In which a number of paintings for which Mrs Eaton was the model was included. A number of people (in addition to my own modest contribution) have worked tirelessly to raise the profile of this much overlooked model, including the art historian Jan Marsh and Mrs Eaton’s descendent Brian Eaton. They too must feel elated to see today’s google doodle; as it firmly sites Mrs Eaton among the canon of Pre-Raphaelite stunners.

Previous posts on Fanny Eaton can be found here http://stellahalliwell.co.uk/2012/01/

and here http://stellahalliwell.co.uk/pre-raphaelites/women-from-nowhere-the-pre-raphaelite-other/

‘Tottie! You don’t know how beautiful Silverdale is and a tower of our own! Think of that! its a sort of country you never saw before. I’ll answer for it.’
(Elizabeth Gaskell in a letter to Eliza Fox, May 1852)

In her letter, Elizabeth Gaskell was writing of Lindeth Tower in Silverdale, and a more beautiful and dreamy spot you will struggle to spy. On our many walks in the area we have often passed the tower and admired it, little thinking that one day we might stay there. But, stay there we did.

Built in 1842 by the Fleetwood family – a shipping family, who gave their name to the Port of Fleetwood- as a summer house and folly, the stone tower sits in a beautiful walled garden with panoramic views over the coast; presumably a means by which the family could keep a close and careful eye on their ships while on summer retreat. Silverdale became a favourite holiday destination for Elizabeth Gaskell and her family (her daughters Meta & Julia are described as ‘enthusiasts for Silverdale’ whereas her daughter Marianne  less so). There are numerous mentions of Lindeth Tower and Silverdale in Gaskell’s letters, some describe the activities the family undertake (farming and country pursuits), some include descriptions concerning the quirks of their accommodation; i.e having to walk across a courtyard in all weathers when transferring a leg of mutton from the larder to the kitchen, and then others including this one; in which she describes the tower thus:

‘In the garden, half flower half kitchen is an old square tower, or ‘Peel’ – a remnant of the Border towers.’

That Gaskell thought the tower to be so old, speaks of its dreamy, fairy-tale quality. Especially when one considers, that when she wrote those lines to Charles Eliot Norton in 1858, the tower was in fact only 16 years old. It seems that the romance of the place captured her imagination and so she transported it to another place and time. I completely understand how she felt, the tower wove a spell over me too. There is something folkloric about it, one could easily imagine border skirmishes or daring deeds having occurred there or indeed it featuring in one of Sir Walter Scott’s ballads. It feels like a place outside reality, a liminal space in which a great change can occur. That change of course being one in the heart, mind and soul.

As a place to stay the tower is simply stunning. Each morning we breakfasted on the roof terrace, and in the evenings we curled up in the cosy sitting room with a book, a roaring fire and a glass of wine. By day we walked. Silverdale is beautiful and is a designated ‘Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty’; the landscape always strikes me as magical and otherworldly as it shifts smoothly from twee country lanes to woodlands and then just as seamlessly to rugged coast. It’s a wonderful place to slow down and be present, to enjoy the simple things like walking and soaking up the wonderful scenery. It’s a place to press pause and breathe.

Silverdale village is relatively small but does have a lovely hostelry, The Silverdale Hotel, where of course food and a libation can be purchased. In nearby Arnside; a slightly larger destination, there are more places to eat and drink, some little shops selling pretty gifts etc and a small art gallery. There is of course Arnside Tower to see and of course, no visit is complete without a walk on the Knott.

Next time we hope to stay longer. My beloved and I both noted that as lovely as it was to walk extensively, it would have been just as lovely to spend the day reading and relaxing in the tower and gardens. We had also planned a visit to Cartmel Priory but ran out of time, so plan to do this during our next stay.

To close -as I began- I cite Elizabeth Gaskell once more, who can say in a few words what I could not in a thousand:
‘…..we all go to our dear old Silverdale on the borders of Morecambe Bay, to run wild there…’

 The Blackbird

Listen to the blackbird singing
To the red flush in the west!
Of all that sing the spring in
The blackbird singeth best

O! how the music swelleth!
As he flutters there hard by,
For joy of the tales he telleth,
For the song that shall never die.

The young lime where he singeth
Will remember all his song,
When on his trunk time bringeth
The mosses clinging long.

To the bees by the blossoms humming
The leaves will tell the tale
In the summer that is coming
As they flutter in the gale[.]

 His singing riseth higher
To the small clouds overhead,
It goeth on to the fire
By the small clouds that is fed.

Sunsets will keep his singing;
When the lime is on the ground.
In the ivy about it clinging
Will thoughts of the song be found.

William Morris
unpublished Draft in B. L. Add. MS 45,298A, ff. 34-34v, in what may be Morris’ hand; see 3.

Autumn Song

Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief
Laid on it for a covering,
And how sleep seems a goodly thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

And how the swift beat of the brain
Falters because it is in vain,
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf
Knowest thou not? and how the chief
Of joys seems – not to suffer pain?

Know’st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the soul feels like a dried sheaf
Bound up at length for harvesting,
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?

Spying the first acorn, those first chills to the air and ultimately the changing hues of leaves usher in one of the gentlest of seasons – AUTUMN. For some it is a season synonymous with decay and death, but for me it is quite the opposite. Being instead, a new view of the world and its bare bones in their naked honesty as the cycle of renewal begins again. As most gardeners know, the chopping back of faded perennials in autumn often reveals the newly formed shoots that will be next summer’s glory.

Many of my favourite paintings by Millais are autumnal in theme and by the virtuosity of his hand and romantic soul, imbued with sense of fairy-tale enchantment. Millais has a keen sense of the ethereal, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary regardless of subject and narrative.

• Autumn Leaves (1856) is perhaps one of Millais’s most famous works and often discussed in terms of the symbolism therein. By Juxtaposing a heap of decaying leaves with the fresh youthful girls and the brooding sky at twilight, the composition readily lends itself to a discussion on the transience of youth and mortality. However in a letter to F.G. Stephens, Millais describes how he had “intended the picture to awaken by its solemnity the deepest religious reflection. I chose the subject of burning leaves as most calculated to produce this feeling”. Can we therefore infer from Millais comment that rather than being a melancholic dirge on the inevitably of human decline, that he was aiming for something more ethereal in sentiment; a moment of silence and a space for reflection that is outside the ordinary material world? If we consider it so, then what Millais provides the viewer with is the means of transporting themselves to a higher spiritual plane by employing the vernacular symbolism of the every day. Elements of the composition support this assertion; despite the scene being one of action there is a static quality to the figures, the directional variance in the girls’ respective gazes imbues the painting with a feeling of their disconnection from corporeality.

However the painting did not weave its magic upon its first owner Mr Eden from Lytham. Eden disliked the painting intensely when it reached him, asking that Millais take the painting back. His request was declined by Millais’s wife, Effie, who advised Eden sit opposite it at dinner for a few months. Following this advice Eden found that proximity to the work produced an even greater dislike of it and so when his friend Mr Miller of Preston offered to exchange any three of his paintings for the Millais. Eden was quick to accept.

‘Autumn Leaves’ can be seen in all its splendour at Manchester City Art Gallery, where it forms part of the permanent display of Pre-Raphaelite artworks.

As many Pre-Raphaelite scholars and enthusiasts will be aware, today is the anniversary of Elizabeth Siddal’s death, and as such an appropriate day to celebrate her artistic and literary endeavours. Perceptions of Lizzie are somewhat at odds with her actuality. She is often portrayed as a sulky and manipulative invalid (Violet Hunt’s The Wife of Rossetti), socially awkward and difficult: “not quite easy to understand, and not at all on the surface. All her talk was of a “chaffy” kind its tone sarcastic, its substance lightsome,” (WMR in Hawksley 57-58)

Yet the few extant letters by Lizzie show her to be witty and humorous, and mentions of her in Rossetti’s letters show her to be physically and mentally engaged with her work despite health problems. Although it is never said, between the lines of many accounts of her is the suggestion that Lizzie was a little bit too pleased with herself and haughty, yet her self portrait (1854) shows no trace of such narcissism or arrogance.

There is an unerring honesty about this portrait, her dress and hair are simply presented, her expression serious and the palette muted giving weight to her artistic aspirations. Lizzie wanted to be taken seriously.

As many of her paintings demonstrate Lizzie clearly had a good eye for colour and composition, her technical ability is weaker but improvement -as the below image shows- is also evident as time passes.

Sir Patrick Spens 1856

Sir Patrick Spens (1856) is one of Lizzie’s most compelling works, the drama of the cliffs and sea beyond is juxtaposed with the stillness and misery of the foreground figures. Lizzie articulates the agony of watching and waiting and the numbed expression concomitant with grief. An improvement in Lizzie’s painting ability is in evidence here too. Her figures have a greater refinement and she demonstrates her growing confidence by painting hands in complex contortions with, it has to be said, some success.

Lizzie’s poetry also has great appeal, its strength being in its simplicity. Rather than the complex and sometimes inaccessible verse of Dante Rossetti, Lizzie’s poetry is readable and as such highly evocative and emotive. Critics have often commented on the morbid and maudlin nature of her verse but the same can be said of many poets of the period; male and female alike. One doesn’t have to look too far to Christina Rossetti’s poetry or Mary Coleridge or to Tennyson, Browning and Keats to see similarly themed works.

Although the number of extant poems by Lizzie are few, once again we can see her promise. The below poem A Year and A Day is redolent with both sadness, and a distinct love of nature. The leaves, grass and corn are beautiful, cruel and eternal like the loss of love.

A Year and a Day

Slow days have passed that make a year,
Slow hours that make a day,
Since I could take my first dear love
And kiss him the old way;
Yet the green leaves touch me on the cheek,
Dear Christ, this month of May.

I lie among the tall green grass
That bends above my head
And covers up my wasted face
And folds me in its bed
Tenderly and lovingly
Like grass above the dead.

Dim phantoms of an unknown ill
Float through my tired brain;
The unformed visions of my life
Pass by in ghostly train;
Some pause to touch me on the cheek,
Some scatter tears like rain.

A shadow falls along the grass
And lingers at my feet;
A new face lies between my hands –
Dear Christ, if I could weep
Tears to shut out the summer leaves
When this new face I greet.

Still it is but the memory
Of something I have seen
In the dreamy summer weather
When the green leaves came between:
The shadow of my dear love’s face –
So far and strange it seems.

The river ever running down
Between its grassy bed,
The voices of a thousand birds
That clang above my head,
Shall bring to me a sadder dream
When this sad dream is dead.

A silence falls upon my heart
And hushes all its pain.
I stretch my hands in the long grass
And fall to sleep again,
There to lie empty of all love
Like beaten corn of grain.

So today, on the 153 rd anniversary of Lizzie’s death let’s celebrate her life, achievements and promise rather than forever consigning her to the role of tragic muse.

Elizabeth Siddal 25 July 1829 – 11 February 1862: Artist and Poet.

For more on Lizzie please visit http://lizziesiddal.com

For the last couple of days there has been a perceptible nip in the air heralding the arrival of autumn. Autumn is a season that lends itself to the Pre-Raphaelite eye with its combination of rich jewel tones and earthy hues, delicious smells and sounds. Who can resist the sweet scent of fallen leaves as they crunch satisfyingly underfoot? Yet the sweet smell of crumbling leaves is the scent of decay, and their audible crunch a reminder of the transience of all living things.

Memento homo, quod cinis es, et in cinerem reverteris
(Remember, O Man, that thou art dust, and to dust shalt return)

We live we die, and the world turns and it all starts again. Gloomy eh

In modernity John Everett Millais’ painting Autumn Leaves (1855-66) has been described as ‘a rumination on the transience of life’ (Rosenfeld, 2007, p. 132). Without a doubt the pictorial elements of the work lend themselves to this interpretation: four exquisitely pretty young girls gathering and piling fallen leaves in the gloaming certainly shouts “you might be young now but twilight surely follows day turning to night and like the leaves you will wither and die”. The presence of a half-seen reaper definitely adds further weight to this interpretation.

John Everett Millais, Autumn Leaves, 1855-6

Blimey, I’m feeling a bit ‘Sylvia Plath’ after that. But wait…

In a letter written in the autumn in which the painting was begun Millais wrote to Charles Collins ‘The only head you could paint to be considered beautiful by EVERYBODY would be the face of a little girl about eight years old, before humanity is subject to change’. (ibid)

What Millais was aiming for then wasn’t so much ‘life is fragile’ but an allusion to the imminent loss of innocence. The inclusion of the apple – a symbol for temptation and the loss of innocence- in the hand of the smallest child certainly suggests this. Is that a bite she’s taken too or a trick of the light? Either way the ambiguity creates tension. If we contextualise the girls within the framework of the law, the age of consent being 12 at this period, then at least three of the girls are legally adults, or fast approaching it. The smaller girl, who if she is around 8 years old as Millais’ letter suggests, although not of consensual age is equidistant in years from infancy to womanhood and therefore could be dubbed a child-women. A concept that was not without appeal to the Victorian male – as is evidenced by the character Quilp from Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop(1841) and his obsession with Little Nell Dodgson’s photographs of Alice Liddell.

Similarly elegiac in tone is Christina Rossetti’s poem Autumn. Only in place of Millais lament for the loss of innocence Rossetti mourns the inexorable extent of hers:

I dwell alone - I dwell alone, alone
Whilst full my river flows down to the sea
Gilded with flashing boats
That brings no friend to me
Love Songs, gurgling from a hundred throats,
O love pangs let me be (Rossetti, 1892,p.84)

Rossetti is explicit in this opening verse, the protagonist is lonely and all her chances to be that bastion of Victorian womanhood, a wife and a mother, are passing her by. The ache she feels for what is missing in her life is acutely felt, and all the more painful for the reader if we read the poem biographically. In 1848 Rossetti became engaged to the friend of her brothers and fellow PRB member James Collinson. Alas the engagement was not to last and was broken by Rossetti when Collinson converted to Catholicism. While it may seem that Autumn, written in 1858 bears no relevance being ten years distant from the broken engagement ; it is salient to note that Autumn was written a mere two months after James Collinson married Eliza Wheeler aged 40, a woman 12 years Rossetti’s senior.

As the poem progresses the protagonist reveals the agony of being a woman who has lost out in love and whose prime is passing. The cruelty of her situation made all the more acute in her cognisance that her loss was of her own doing of it. All about her ‘the gilded boats’ with their rich cargoes of ‘gold, stone and spices’ are clearly destined for, ahem, other ports.

In the later verses Rossetti introduces autumnal imagery to her metaphorical landscape to emphasise her fading prime and diminished hope:

 One last solitary swallow flies
 Across the sea, rough autumn tost…'
 

And

Mine Avenue is all a growth of oaks,
Some rent by thunder strokes
Some rustling leaves and acorns in the breeze
fair fall my fertile trees.

The final verse is the most emotive and explicit:

My trees are not in flower
I have no bower
and a gusty wind creaks my tower
and lonesome, very lonesome is my strand. (Rossetti, 1892, p85-86)

Here, the protagonist’s sense of loss and desolation is absolute as the last of autumn finally gives way to a barren winter.Autumn is introspective. Rossetti picks apart the loss of her relationship and all that it would have brought; a situation that closely parallels and is best summed up by the fictional character of Charlotte Vale in the 1942 film Now Voyager ¹.On the breaking of her own engagement to Elliot, Charlotte’s inner self says in voiceover ‘You fool, oh you fool. Now you’ll never have a home of your own, or a man of your own, or a child of your own’.

John Everett Millais, Lingering Autumn, 1890

Phew, not all autumnal Pre-Raphaelite works carry a doom and gloom metaphor. Millais’ Lingering Autumn (1890) like Autumn Leaves juxtaposes youth and the autumnal landscape, only in the former the sentiment is more celebratory in tone. In Lingering Autumn rather than using autumn as a metaphor for decay and loss Millais presents us with two types of beauty, each exquisite in their own right.

Also, hurray for Holman- Hunt who I suspect on the quiet was a bit of a sauce pot as his painting Love at First Sight suggests. We have to rewind slightly to before the image conscious Edith Holman- Hunt left her indelible chastened mark upon her husband’s legacy. Edith was in short a bit of tinker when it came to the whitewashing of her husband’s life and works. Anything that could destroy his sainted image was done away, like the original title of his 1848 painting Blackheath Park which perhaps given the content was just a little too ambiguous for the prim Edith. As you can see below, the painting showstwo figures, one male and one female in the beautiful wilderness of Blackheath Park, and I say wilderness because during the 19^th century it truly was. In the background a dense patch of trees which although redolent with leaves show some signs of the onset of autumn. ² In the foreground there are a stag and two does watching the man and woman who have turned to look back at one another as they pass.

If we analyse the pictorial elements further we can suggest a reading of the work whose theme is far saucier than that of Edith’s later applied title. Things to note:

1. A well dressed man and unchaperoned woman out and about in an untamed desolate spot. Not exactly the image of moral propriety cultivated by middling sort is it?
2. In folklore, a discipline that was of keen interest to the Victorians, the stag is a symbol of male virility.
3. With further reference to stags and virility, the onset of autumn also marks the commencement of the rut!

Mon dieu,I can hear the knicker elastic snapping from here!Lust at First Sight might be a little more apt………(sorry Edith). Of course I’m being frivolous and mine is only one of a plethora of possible narratives for the piece. Perhaps Holman-Hunt was deliberately ambiguous with his title to encourage rather than impose a meaning upon the viewer. Either way it’s a lot of fun to speculate!

Well there we have it, Pre-Raphaelite autumn in a (chest)nut shell, it might all be sex and death but at least it’s beautiful while it’s about it.

¹ The title Now Voyager was taken from a line by the poet Walt Whitman, who was acquainted with, and much admired by the Pre-Raphaelites’, particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

² A note on the back of canvas indicates that the picture was produced in the autumn of 1848. Primary evidence also shows that the PRB were involved in group outings to sketch in the area at this time.

The joy of a new piece of tech -in this case a phone- is discovering all the weird and wonderful things it can do in addition to its obvious function. The cameras on phones have come on leaps and bounds haven’t they! Most produce better quality images than the average small compact camera these days and in some cases out perform their SLR counterparts. What makes camera phone photography interesting is the plethora of effect options that can be applied. Some of the effects, such as ‘warm vintage’ etc can be a bit twee, but solarisation… now that’s exciting.

Solarisation is a technique in traditional film photography and is achieved through the overexposure of either the negative or print to light. Many claim to have discovered it or at least to be aware of it; everyone from Daguerre (1787-1851) to Herschel (1792-1871) acknowledged that the overexposure of the negative within the camera produced an interesting reverse negative effect on some tones when printed. It was however the St Helens, Merseyside, born John William Draper who first coined the term solarisation. It didn’t take long before photographers discovered that the same effect could be achieved in the darkroom and was duly dubbed the Pseudo-Solarisation by H. de la Blanchere in 1859 in L’Art du Photographe. Blanchere described how briefly exposing a silver halide print to white light produced the same results that overexposure in the camera had achieved. Despite their knowledge of the effect, photographers regarded a solarised image as a defective one, not seeing the artistic possibilities of the technique. That said, the academic Janet Buerger has suggested that the below photographs taken by the artist Edgar Degas in 1881 may be an early artistic experiment with the effect.

Perhaps the most famous exponent of Pseudo-Solarisation was the artist Man Ray, who produced some astoundingly beautiful images in which his assistant and muse Lee Miller was intrinsic in more ways than one. It was Miller who accidentally ‘rediscovered’ solarisation while working as an assistant in Man Ray’s studio. Ray was reputedly so intrigued by the effect that he worked to perfect the technique for producing consistent solarised images. Below are a small number of Man Ray’s solarised images, including a self-portrait and a number of images for which Miller was the model.

From an art historical perspective one has to wonder what Man Ray would have made of the immediacy of the camera phone and its solarising filter. Would he have loathed it for removing the skill and the artistry in the physical making. Or in the spirit of all his other readymades would he have seen the camera phone and its solarising filter as an extension of that practice? I suspect the latter.

From the plethora of professional and talented photographers I return to an amateur one and her camera phone. To date I have ‘solarised’ the cats, flowers in the garden and will, if I can get him to sit still long enough, solarise my beau. And just to prove that my naffness knows no bounds, I’ve embraced the spirit of Ray and Miller and solarised a miniature bronze reproduction of The Winged Victory of Samothrace – well it is a readymade after all!

For more photography by Man Ray please visit http://www.manray-photo.com/catalog/index.php

and the for the wonderful Lee Miller please visit http://www.leemiller.co.uk/

I admit it; I suffer from the perennial disease of 6 degrees of Pre-Raphaelite separation. I am able one way or another to link seemingly disparate things to my favourite art movement. This one however appears to be a bit of a no-brainer.

This morning I was sent a link to First time ever I saw your face by Broadcaster feat Peggy Seeger (which you should all listen to because it’s fab). I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Tubeway Army’s “Are ‘Friends’ Electric?”. A quick tappity tap on my keyboard and up popped the cover art for the single, I was astonished.

The visual parity between the cover image of Numan and Solomon’s paintings Creation (1890) and Night (1890) is striking. Like Solomon’s paintings the record sleeve features a figure (a pouty Numan) shown against a dark and foreboding sky, replete with crescent moon. I love how the haziness of the Numan image even manages to look like it was rendered in the watercolour medium used by Solomon in the paintings cited.

Creation (1890) by Simeon Solomon

Night (1890) by Simeon Solomon

I have no idea if the parity was deliberate; interest in the Pre-Raphaelite movement was certainly high during the 70’s. Either way it is very striking!

A short biography of Simeon Solomon

Born in 1840, the youngest of 8 children Solomon was born into a prominent Jewish family. His Father, Michael, was a successful merchant and his mother Kate (nee Levy, an artist. Like his siblings Abraham and Rebecca, Simeon Solomon carved out a successful artistic career. During his early career Solomon concentrated chiefly on Hebraic imagery in a Pre-Raphaelite style. However from 1863 onwards it is clear that his style was moving away from Pre-Raphaelite ‘truth to nature’ and becoming increasingly aesthetic and symbolist. By late 1860’s he was painting figures such as Bacchus from classical mythology. This caused consternation and led to the accusation that he had abandoned his Hebrew roots.

In 1873 Solomon was arrested and charged with attempting to commit sodomy in a public toilet. His reputation did not recover from this and he found himself largely friendless and destitute. In 1884, suffering from severe alcoholism Solomon entered the workhouse where he continued to paint and draw up until his death in 1905.

During his career Solomon produced some of the most remarkably sensitive and beautiful images of the era. A selection of Solomon’s work can be found in the artwork databases at http://www.simeonsolomon.com/index.html

Its Shakespeare’s birthday hurrah!

I love Shakespeare, however I’m feeling a bit mischievous and here offer the irreverent musings of the poet UA Fanthorpe. Although I don’t share the adolescent protagonist’s assertion that ‘Shakespeare… is a national disaster’, I am amused by it.

UA Fanthorpe had a distinguished career as a teacher, but chose to turn her back on it to become a receptionist and pursue her interest in writing poetry. I’m so glad she did. Her poetry is linguistically simple, but extremely witty.

More about UA Fanthorpe can be found here: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=157#

Dear Mr Lee

Dear Mr Lee (Mr Smart says
it’s rude to call you Laurie, but that’s
how I think of you, having lived with you
really all year), Dear Mr Lee
(Laurie) I just want you to know
I used to hate English, and Mr Smart
is roughly my least favourite person,
and as for Shakespeare (we’re doing him too)
I think he’s a national disaster, with all those jokes
that Mr Smart has to explain why they’re jokes,
and even then no one thinks they’re funny,
And T. Hughes and P. Larkin and that lot
in our anthology, not exactly a laugh a minute,
pretty gloomy really, so that’s why
I wanted to say Dear Laurie (sorry) your book’s
the one that made up for the others, if you
could see my copy you’d know it’s lived
with me, stained with Coke and Kitkat
and when I had a cold, and I often
take you to bed with me to cheer me up
so Dear Laurie, I want to say sorry,
I didn’t want to write a character-sketch
of your mother under headings, it seemed
wrong somehow when you’d made her so lovely,
and I didn’t much like those questions
about social welfare in the rural community
and the seasons as perceived by an adolescent,
I didn’t think you’d want your book
read that way, but bits of it I know by heart,
and I wish I had your uncles and your half-sisters
and lived in Slad, though Mr Smart says your view
of the class struggle is naive, and the examiners
won’t be impressed by me knowing so much by heart,
they’ll be looking for terse and cogent answers
to their questions, but I’m not much good at terse and cogent,
I’d just like to be like you, not mind about being poor,
see everything bright and strange, the way you do,
and I’ve got the next one out of the Public Library,
about Spain, and I asked Mum about learning
to play the fiddle, but Mr Smart says Spain isn’t
like that any more, it’s all Timeshare villas
and Torremolinos, and how old were you
when you became a poet? (Mr Smart says for anyone
with my punctuation to consider poetry as a career
is enough to make the angels weep).

PS Dear Laurie, please don’t feel guilty for
me failing the exam, it wasn’t your fault,
it was mine, and Shakespeare’s
and maybe Mr Smart’s, I still love Cider
it hasn’t made any difference.