Someone sent me Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens to read.

A woman is sitting in her garden. She’s having coffee and oranges. There’s fruit on the trees, and a cockatoo. Lovely, I thought. It all sounds very nice. But so what?

I struggled through the poem until…

Death is what?

I have experienced plenty of beauty in my life. It was all very nice, but what does death have to do with it? Does death create beauty? Would we still have beauty if we did not have death? Why can’t we have mystic beauty forever?

I had to start over to find the answers.

Our lady is sitting in her garden on a Sunday morning, when she is supposed to be in church. She is enjoying the beauty and her dreams, until the dark dreams start to creep in.

What is that old catastrophe? It’s death, isn’t it? Death is coming.

At first, she is afraid and mourns the things that will be lost when she leaves this life behind. Her delightful garden. Her cockatoo.

Christians tell us life is just a brief preamble while we wait for everlasting life in heaven. But how do we know heaven is coming? We have no evidence for it. People talk about it, and we can dream about it. But how do we know?

The narrator reminds us there is plenty of beauty to cherish here on Earth, without thoughts of heaven. Plenty of natural beauty. Plenty of ripe fruit.

Would we want life to be all delightful, all the time? Heaven is supposed to be always joyful, but I expect it would get boring without the ups and downs that we experience down here on Earth. We need some bad to highlight the good.

Would we even recognise the good without the bad to contrast with it? Do they even have bad in heaven? Or is it just good that goes on forever and ever?

Just imagine. You wake up on a Sunday morning, and there’s coffee and oranges, and then the same thing the next day. And the day after that. And this will go on forever because you are immortal now.

We need to experience the ups and downs to really appreciate the ups. It will soon get boring if every day is filled with sunshine.

Lao Tzu had something to say about this.

A first reading of Lao Tzu says that perhaps if we get rid of beauty, it will save us from the negative emotions that come with ugliness. But do we really want to get rid of beauty?

This takes us back to the lines that helped me understand what Sunday Morning is all about.

We can’t appreciate the good without some bad to contrast with it, and death is the worst bad of all. The promise of death encourages us to cherish life with all its beauty. Without death to focus our desires, the beauty will lose its charm.

There were three men came out of the west
Their fortunes for to try,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die.

They’ve ploughed, they’ve sown, they’ve harrowed him in
Threw clods upon his head,
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead.

John Barleycorn is the personification of beer and/or barley and the three men from the west killed him and buried him in the ground.

They let him lie for a very long time
Till the rains from Heaven did fall,
And little Sir John sprung up his head
And so amazed them all.

They’ve let him stand till Midsummer’s day,
Till he looked both pale and wan.
And little Sir John’s grown a long, long beard
And so become a man.

But John Barleycorn springs back to life and grows strong again… until the men cut him down and make sure that he is really dead this time.

They’ve hired men with the scythes so sharp,
To cut him off at the knee,
They’ve rolled him and tied him by the waist,
Serving him most barbarously.

They’ve hired men with the sharp pitchforks,
Who pricked him through the heart
And the loader, he has served him worse than that,
For he’s bound him to the cart.

They’ve wheeled him around and around a field,
Till they came unto a barn,
And there they made a solemn oath
On poor John Barleycorn

They grind up him up to make beer giving John Barleycorn the chance to get his revenge on those three men from the west.

They’ve hired men with the crab-tree sticks,
To cut him skin from bone,
And the miller, he has served him worse than that,
For he’s ground him between two stones.

And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl
And his brandy in the glass
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at last

The huntsman, he can’t hunt the fox
Nor so loudly to blow his horn,
And the tinker, he can’t mend kettle nor pots
without a little barley corn

The earliest surviving written record is from the sixteenth century but there is evidence that the song and the story is much older – like this twelfth century pub in Hampshire.

I spent a very pleasant day listening to every version I could find – from Martin Carthy to Paul Weller via Billy Bragg and Jethro Tull and The Fairport Convention and many, many more. The best version by far is by Traffic but they each have their own charms.

Turn up the volume and raise a glass to that ancient hero.

Long live John Barleycorn!

Ragged Clown, 2024
(after Baudelaire)

When shall we leave?

By the time I got back, I was enchanted by both.

Being untutored in the arts, I was free to decide for myself what I liked and what I didn’t — even if what I liked wasn’t the right thing or it was unfashionable or whatever. That sentiment applied equally to my music playing and to poetry.

One night, in Darwin, during a bone-shaking thunderstorm, I heard someone playing blues harp in the other room. It was the most amazing sound I had ever heard come out of a harmonica and I went to investigate. There was an Australian dude a little older than me and we got talking.

He invited me to play a little too and he said words to the effect of “Wow! I have never heard anyone play the harmonica like that!”. I am still not sure if he meant Wow! That was great! or Wow! You suck!

Since I had no idea how I was meant to play it, I just played what sounded good to me. Same deal with poetry.

I jumped around all over the poetry book and each poem launched me into a quest for more poetry like this one. I had been force-fed Wilfred Owen at school but reading him of my own accord felt reckless, revolutionary. After six years in the Royal Navy, I had to read poetry to find out what war was about.

I have, again, no recollection of why I decided that I should learn The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by heart but I gave up after about 75 verses. I was heartbroken when my new team at work decided that Team Albatross was too gloomy for a team name. They must not have read Coleridge (or heard the song).

My tastes were eclectic (sorry, Dylan, that I made you learn For Whom the Bell Tolls for a recital) and after mini-expeditions with Kipling (Kim, The Man Who Would be King), DH Lawrence (The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love) and a day trip or two with Tennyson and Betjeman, I settled on George Gordon Byron as my travelling companion and soulmate.

I read everything that Byron had ever written and, for a short, mad while, I wanted to be him. I wanted to be the second mortal to swim the Hellespont; I wanted to so scandalize my wife on my wedding night that she would file for divorce the very next day (must’ve been a pretty successful night as it produced Lady Ada who also discovered the joys of programming); I wanted to seduce the wives, sisters, sons and mothers of prominent politicians, including the prime minister’s; I wanted to raise a private army and go liberate the Greeks from the Turks or to die trying – like Byron did.

Shelley and Keats travelled with us for a while, but neither thrilled me the way Byron thrilled me.

I haven’t read poetry for a long, long time – except to read old favourites to my daughter. My passion, like Byron’s life, was brief but intense.

He compares the pro-war conservatives in the US with the militaristic imperialists (“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori“) in pre-World War I Europe and suggests that the seminal event which ended such thinking in Europe was, in fact, The Great War.

Interesting analysis that I need time to digest but I can’t let the Dulce et Decorum reference to pass without quoting Wilfred Owen.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.–
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Historical note : Wilfred Owen completed this in 1918 but still found time to die before the end of the war a few months later.

Mrs Clown and I attended the Remembrance Day parade in Bristol yesterday. My nan and grandad took me to my first parade in Footscray in, maybe, 1972. I was in the first rank of the Bexleyheath parade as a Sea Cadet in 1980 and marched with the grown up soldiers and sailors on Plymouth Hoe in 1982.

Aftermath (1919)

Have you forgotten yet?…
For the world’s events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you’re a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same,—and War’s a bloody game….
Have you forgotten yet?…
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you’ll never forget.

Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,—
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,—
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, “Is it all going to happen again?”

Do you remember that hour of din before the attack,—
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads, those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?

Have you forgotten yet?…
Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you’ll never forget.

Siegfried Sassoon, 1886-1967

Despite what the Bristol Post says, there were very few young people at the parade yesterday, other than small children with their parents and the cadets marching in the parade. I wonder how long these parades will continue?

When we recited the Lord’s Prayer, I was struck by the fact that everyone around me knew the words too. How long before that, too, is forgotten?

Anglicans add the line “for thine is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever” to the end of the Lord’s Prayer but a recent survey by British Social Attitudes says that “Only 3% of adults under 24 describe themselves as Anglican”. Maybe Christianity will last for ever, but maybe not that bit of the prayer.

We sang Carols at the tree lighting ceremony in Clifton Village last Wednesday. They handed out hymn sheets but everyone already knew the words. I saw no young people though either despite the thousands of students who live in Clifton. How long before Carols are forgotten too?

I believe it was the battles of the Somme and Verdun and Passchendaele that precipitated the long slide in religious belief in Europe. When the Church, all over Europe, gave so much support for the most atrocious war in all history, it’s hard to imagine that its moral authority could continue forever. Maybe it’s right that we should forget those terrible wars now. After all, we’ve had more than 70 years of peace now.

The European Union has its roots in an effort to bind together the French and German economies after World War 2 so that these terrible tragedies might never happen again. Churchill, having seen a few wars first-hand himself, was a supporter. Too many people have forgotten this and now a handful of Tory opportunists have persuaded them that we don’t need this security any more. Across the Atlantic, the President Trump is doing his best to undermine the institutions that have kept us safe and prosperous for so long. Half the country thinks this will somehow Make America Great Again.

At the Remembrance ceremonies in France, Macron and Merkel held hands in a symbolic rejection of past enmities. The American president, famously, chose not attend the remembrance of America’s contribution to the end of World War I.

As these awful conflicts fade out of memory, it becomes easier to think that they’ll never happen again, even as we dismantle the institutions that made them stop.

“So now every April I sit on my porch
And I watch the parade pass before me.
And I see my old comrades, how proudly they march
Reliving their dreams and past glory,
I see the old men all tired, stiff and sore
Those forgotten heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask “What are they marching for?”
And I ask myself the same question.
But the band plays Waltzing Matilda,
And the old men still answer the call,
But year after year, the numbers get fewer
Someday, no one will march there at all.”
—Eric Bogle

Photo Credits:

• Bristol Remembrance Day photos from the Bristol Post
• Clifton Christmas Tree Lighting from Discover Clifton
• Macron & Merkel photo from Getty Images via The Guardian.

Betty came by on her way
Said she had a word to say
About things today
And fallen leaves.

We walked along the riverside and talked about what was happening in our lives. I asked Betty why she was so sad.

“My leaves are falling”, she answered.
“Mine are falling too.”, I said.

Betty knew nothing about my troubles. Hers were bad enough.

“What will you do?” I asked her.

She told me she hadn’t decided yet. She thought it might be OK. Maybe it would be OK for me too.

“We can’t last forever though. None of us can. But maybe we can just enjoy what we have.”

“Let’s ask the River Man!” I called out as I ran to the waterside. “He’ll know.”

The river man knew what was coming. He always does. He knows where the river will take us.

I told him about the falling leaves that made us so sad and I told him about the hillside where the lilacs grow in spring. Betty told him how much she loved those lilacs, too.

“What should we do?” we asked him.

“I can’t tell you everything that’s coming”, said the river man.
“But I know the summer will come. The river will take you there.”

“We’ll go out to the countryside when the summer comes.”, Betty said with a smile. “I’d like to see the stars one more time.”

Betty’s smile was gone the next morning. The hurt inside was too much. She asked the river man for help but there was no reply.

“Sometimes I wish it was all over”, she said with tears in her eyes. “But sometimes I wish the clouds would blow away and we could enjoy the river’s flow some more.”

“Let’s see what the summer brings. The river man said we’ll see the summer. Let’s pray for sunshine.”

The summer, when it came, brought light showers and we walked along the river bank. The rain washed away Betty’s sadness. It washed mine away too.

“Can we walk a little more, Betty?”
“Why don’t we see what the river man says?” she answered.

We told the river man about our tears. The rain had washed away, but our tears came back to us as summer drifted away.

“Will we see another summer?”, we asked.

“Just follow the river.” he said.
“The river will take you to where you need to go.”

“Where will it take us?” I asked.

The river man was silent and we knew our river was coming to an end.

It was a quiet day at the office today
The drive home was quieter still.
“Like every day really”, she thought to herself.
“A little work, a little time to kill”.

“How would she kill her free time today?”
She wondered as she opened the door.
“A movie perhaps? Or a book? Or TV?”
“Or just wash the kitchen floor?”

Life had been kind to Alice.
She had everything a woman could want.
A wonderful man. Two beautiful children.
A house at the edge of the wood.
Marvellous health. No financial concerns.
She went jogging whenever she could.

“Who could want more than a comfortable life?”
She reflected before starting the dinner.
“If life is a contest with winners and losers,
I have clearly come out as a winner.”

A knock on the door interrupted her musings.
Startled, she got up from her chair.
“Now who could that be ?”, she silently asked.
But when she looked, there was nobody there.

Just a bottle. A small one. She looked at it now;
Felt the weight in the palm of her hand.
On the lid was a label, in the shape of a heart,
With just two words, “From Wonderland”.

Her heart skipped a beat, as the dreams flooded back.
Those memories from so long ago.
Try as she might to put them out of her head,
Unbidden, they started to grow.

How strange were those dreams from her previous life!
Strange, without reason nor rhyme.
Some were savage. Some heartwarming. Some hazy. Some clear.
All softened through the filter of time.

She read the label again. “From Wonderland”.
She shook her head. Could it really be so?
She closed her eyes, bit her lip as she reached her conclusion.
She decided she’d rather not know.

Alice opened the closet which was under the stairs —
The one with the mop and the broom —
She put the parcel inside and shut the door quick
And went back to sit down in her room.

I started writing this about twenty years ago. I had big ideas for an epic poem but never got around to continuing it. I doubt if I ever will now. It was gonna be about a grown-up Alice who has put Wonderland out of her mind but the memories of her past adventures come flooding back to interrupt the drudgery of middle age when she receives a package on her doorstep.

I have only ever shown it to one person before.