Thirty-Five Poems by Herbert Read

Thirty-Five Poems by Herbert Read, I repeat

Stavesacre – a larkspur plant or its seeds

Benison - benediction

Sodality – fellowship, concgregaion, association for chairty

Cincture – belt or girdle

Lanthorn – lantern

Herbert Read, in the veritable slim volume, starts in the First World War. He is not particularly well known as a war poet, but he has been honoured as such. For him, it seems that the confrontation with daily horror led not only to the recognition of the absurdity of conflict, but also an appreciation of its political futility.

… Our victory was our defeat

Power was retained where power had been misused

And youth was left to sweep away

The ashes that fires had strewn beneath our feet.

 

The poetry is often rooted in the tangibly real, so much so that it sometimes seems to deny the possibility of an imagined ideal.

 

… Now chaos intervenes

and I leave not gladly but with harsh disdain

a world too strong in folly for the bliss of dreams.

 

He was a noted anarchist and was politically and philosophically sophisticated. But sometimes the simplest argument is stronger.

… your god has not this power. Or he would heal

the world’s wounds and create the empire

now left in the defeated hands of men.

 

He does not, however, appear to be an atheist overall. He does allow himself occasionally to inhabit a heaven he often seems to deny.

 

This good achieved, then to God we turn

for a crown on our perfection: God we create

in the end of action, not in dreams.

 

There is only reality, however. The experience of that reality, in all its natural beauty is here. It presents experience which is worth recording merely for what it is, But reality, also, just might not be the only thing we might encounter.

 

Fate is in facts: the only hope

an unknown chance.