I've tried in fairly recent years
to write a number of poems in very tight rhyme and meter,
attempting to recapture a tone which
I think has been lost since the late Victorian period.
A number of poets, Tennyson, most notably,
but some smaller ones, like Ernest Dowson,
could get a very musical effect through a high polish
in the rhyme and meter, which produced a dreamlike effect,
in a way rather like a dreamlike effect you
get in certain surrealist paintings.
So the extreme precision of the drawing,
I'm thinking particularly of Dali.
And I wanted to capture this again
in a sequence of poems of my own, three of which
were about the 1939 - 1945 war.
I was seven years old when the war began.
And a number of instance in it have stayed with me
and have had a fairly traumatic effect on certain themes
in my poems.
I'll read you one called "The Land Mine."
A land mine was a kind of bomb which was dropped by parachute
and exploded on the ground sometime later
and was extremely destructive.
One of these dropped at the bottom of my garden
and destroyed my house, as I sleep in it with my parents.
And in this poem, I use this incident
in a rather servile way.
I imagine some to whom this happened having a dream,
and dreaming that the bomb caused the garden
to come into the house.
I think this idea was suggested by seeing
flowers growing on bomb sites.
And they always seem to do this extremely luxuriantly,
for some reason.
"The Landmine"
It fell when I was sleeping.
In my dream, it brought the garden to the house
and let it in.
I heard no parrot scream or lion roar,
but there were flowers and water flowing where the cellared moss
was all before.
And air moved as in bars of cedar,
with a scented breath of smoke and fire.
I rubbed scales from my eyes and wiped with brushed stone
in my hair, half-woke in fear.
I saw my father kneel on glass that scarred the ground. .
And there were flies thick on that water,
weeds around his heel where he was playing.
And I knew that night had cataracted through the wall
and loosed fine doors whose hinges had been tight and made
each window weep, the last tears that clawed my hands.
I climb through holes.
My hall where I had lain asleep with stoppered ears
was all in ruins, planted thick with grime of war.
I walked as if in greaves through fire,
lay down in gutters choked with lime, and spoke for help.
Alas, those birds that dived in light above me in the leaves
were birds of prey and paid no heed to words.
Now I was walking, wearing on my brow what
moved before through fireless coal and held my father's head.
I touch it now and feel my dream girl.
And no song that flying birds can make or burrowing mole
will bring my garden back or break new ground.
The war is over and the mine has gone
that filled the air with whinnying fire.
And no more nights will I lie waiting
on cold metal or cold stone to freeze before it comes again.
That day of ire, if it shall come, will find me on my knees.