WEBVTT

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And here's a poem--

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I didn't put this beside it,
but now I come to think of it.

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It's about myself at about
the same age, and it's about--

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it's a very trite scheme.

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It's based on the
idea of life is

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a journey, which is so trite.

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I think one may be forgiven for
not claiming any originality

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and using it.

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There's a point where
cliche becomes so much

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a part of our
customary thoughts,

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that it's no longer a cliche.

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It's like, you know what I mean.

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I hope you do.

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And there is some--
it takes place

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in a small village
in the North of Kent,

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in England, in the marshland.

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And this is a village where
my mother's family come from,

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and where I have
relatives living

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and where I often went
during school vacations

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in my childhood.

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And it's also where
Dickens lived for a while,

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and he wrote the beginning of
Great Expectations about it.

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If you remember that old
movie made in the 1940s,

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based on Great Expectations,
it was filmed around there,

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in those marshes.

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In a strange churchyard, in a
tiny village called Cooling.

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Where there are in fact--

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I don't mention it
in the poem, there's

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gravestones for a family
of five tiny children who

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all died as babies.

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And there's five
tiny little lozenges

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there in the churchyard.

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I don't bring them in.

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They're part of the
general gloom of the place.

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It's called A Sketch
of the Great Dejection.

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Having read the promise
of the hedgerow,

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the body set out anew
on its adventures.

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At length, it came to
a place of poverty,

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of inner and outer famine,
where all movement had stopped,

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except for that of the wind,
which was continual and came

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from elsewhere,

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from the sea, moving
across unplanted fields

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and between headstones
in the little churchyard,

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clogged with nettles, where
no one came between Sundays,

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and few then.

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The wind was like a punishment
to the face and hands.

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These were marshes of privation.

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The mud of the ditches
oozed scummy water.

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The gray reeds were
arrested in growth.

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The sun did not
show even as a blur,

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and the uneven lands
were without definition

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as I was without potent words.

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Inert, I sat upon a
disintegrating gravestone.

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How can I continue?

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I asked.

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I longed to whet my
senses, but on what?