Three for Friday

Seasonal reflections from Wales and lessons from Lancelot Andrewes

As the sun begins to fade from the sky here in South Wales, where I am spending the holidays with family, it seems right to suggest some local writers for this weekend’s reading.

Where better to start than Dylan Thomas’ ‘A Child’s Christmas in Wales’? In a different vein from his elegy ‘Do not go gentle into this good night’ (mentioned in Tuesday’s newsletter), his childhood reminiscences here are written in the rich propulsive rhythm that also colours his radio play Under Milk Wood.

All the Christmases roll down towards the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

This is a seasonal poem from Gillian Clarke, and one which, with restrained anger, taps into our concern for the threat to our natural environment.

Polar

Snowlight and sunlight, the lake glacial.
Too bright to open my eyes
in the dazzle and doze
of a distant January afternoon.

It’s long ago and the house naps in the plush silence
of a house asleep, like absence,
I’m dreaming on the white bear’s shoulder,
paddling the slow hours, my fingers in his fur.

His eyes are glass, each hair a needle of light.
He’s pegged by his claws to the floor like a shirt on the line.
He is a soul. He is what death is. He is transparency,
a loosening floe on the sea.

But I want him alive.
I want him fierce
with belly and breath and growl and beating heart,
I want him dangerous,

I want to follow him over the snows
between the immaculate earth and now,
between the silence and the shot that rang
over the ice at the top of the globe,

when the map of the earth was something we knew by heart,
and they had not shot the bear,
had not loosed the ice,
had not, had not . . .

© 2011, Gillian Clarke
Publisher: First published on PIW, [Poetry International Wales]

Andrewes takes a word and derives the world from it: squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess.

To follow up on the reference to T.S.Eliot’s poem ‘Journey of the Magi’ last Tuesday and his borrowing from Lancelot Andrewes here is T.S. Eliot’s essay on the sixteenth century theologian:

Lancelot Andrewes

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As ever, thank you for joining me here. I wish you all the very best for the holiday season and much good reading in 2024.

As Tuesday fortnight is January 2nd What’s the Story? will take a break that week and resume on January 9th.

I may switch up the Friday reading recs a little and begin to serialise a novel of mine. Let’s see how that goes!