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.
