And here's a poem--
I didn't put this beside it, but now I come to think of it.
It's about myself at about the same age, and it's about--
it's a very trite scheme.
It's based on the idea of life is
a journey, which is so trite.
I think one may be forgiven for not claiming any originality
and using it.
There's a point where cliche becomes so much
a part of our customary thoughts,
that it's no longer a cliche.
It's like, you know what I mean.
I hope you do.
And there is some-- it takes place
in a small village in the North of Kent,
in England, in the marshland.
And this is a village where my mother's family come from,
and where I have relatives living
and where I often went during school vacations
in my childhood.
And it's also where Dickens lived for a while,
and he wrote the beginning of Great Expectations about it.
If you remember that old movie made in the 1940s,
based on Great Expectations, it was filmed around there,
in those marshes.
In a strange churchyard, in a tiny village called Cooling.
Where there are in fact--
I don't mention it in the poem, there's
gravestones for a family of five tiny children who
all died as babies.
And there's five tiny little lozenges
there in the churchyard.
I don't bring them in.
They're part of the general gloom of the place.
It's called A Sketch of the Great Dejection.
Having read the promise of the hedgerow,
the body set out anew on its adventures.
At length, it came to a place of poverty,
of inner and outer famine, where all movement had stopped,
except for that of the wind, which was continual and came
from elsewhere,
from the sea, moving across unplanted fields
and between headstones in the little churchyard,
clogged with nettles, where no one came between Sundays,
and few then.
The wind was like a punishment to the face and hands.
These were marshes of privation.
The mud of the ditches oozed scummy water.
The gray reeds were arrested in growth.
The sun did not show even as a blur,
and the uneven lands were without definition
as I was without potent words.
Inert, I sat upon a disintegrating gravestone.
How can I continue?
I asked.
I longed to whet my senses, but on what?