Regius Professor of English Language and Literature Emeritus, University of Glasgow, etc., prodigious scholar, teacher and writer

Stephen was my twin cousin, childhood and student companion and lifelong comrade and friend. These poems, relating to him, were written over many decades. The last two he requested to be read at his funeral.

Roger van der Weyden’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’ in the National Gallery, Washington  D.C.

(Stephen gave me a print of this painting for our joint 21^st)

The lady rests her hands upon the frame

    as though upon a ledge:

        the picture’s edge

contains her. Other motifs do the same:

        it is as if

        her stiffened coif,

        pinched hair and belt

were meant to put constraints on what she felt.

And yet, for me, this portrait represents

    something I feel central:

        the fundamental

self-possession of her innocence.

        Her folded hands

        mirror the mind’s

        composure. She

is still in an achieved serenity.

I say “achieved” because her innocence

    (at least, so I suspect)

        does not reflect

lack, or avoidance, of experience.

        She’s turned her gaze

        aside because

       she’s seen and known

enough to need, thus, to reflect upon.

As I compose my thoughts, I, too, reflect,

    recalling lines that once

        I wrote and since

I have consigned to fifteen years neglect.

        Yet it is not

        that I forgot

        her, since I find

she still remains a datum in my mind.

“…(Y)ou do not challenge or compel the gaze,

    but, taking, give away

        your mystery,

your husbandry of spirit” – so it says.

        And even now

        those words will do:

        I find I am

in all essential matters much the same.

She brings me back to what is permanent

    within myself; and this

        recalling is

the permanence that art should represent:

        the quiet mind

        that’s not resigned,

        but which resolves,

and is composed; that brings us to ourselves.

Elijah on Horeb

(for Stephen Prickett)

It is enough. Now, O Lord, take away

my life, for I am not better than

my fathers. I only am left, and they

are seeking my life to take it. Then,

why do you make me eat? I have seen

enough of killing, enough of power,

of acts of God – a hand gathering the rain,

wind, earthquake and your all-consuming fire.

What am I doing here? Lord, in these acts

you speak, and what you speak is history,

but my life lies, so many inert facts.

And now I have come, searching this mystery,

wondering, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’

is silence still to be my only answer?

(This poem was triggered by an early academic paper of  Stephen’s, where he notes that the Hebrew, traditionally translated as ‘still small voice’ is actually an oxymoron, ‘the sound of thin silence.’)

 Joyce at Cambridge

Joyce was my cousin’s girlfriend, Catholic,

while we were Methodist.

                                          This was the spark

– and made it safe for her: it had no chance

beyond its nine-term term – important since

she’d planned from childhood to become a nun.

She twinkled, “After all, you have to have known

the world and flesh if you’re to give them up!”

It worked for them, this wry relationship.

After Cambridge, we never met again.

I heard of her three times: the first time when

someone met her at a conference, where

mention of Cambridge met with a blank stare.

Then, years later and middle-aged, I heard

she’d left her Order. Then, later still, she’d died.

Each time, I felt something in me collapse.

She’d told me once, “I think you are, perhaps,

the only person who understands why

I’m going to become a nun.”

                                               Did I?

I doubted it; but felt I had to try.

I owed her for the moral flattery.

She needed something absolute to give

direction to the life she had to live –

not only passion, but a purity

of purpose and perception. Clarity.

She needed something totally secure –

or was that me? I can’t really be sure.

I needed her commitment, to believe

belief was possible. And so I grieve,

not knowing which I feel the greater loss,

her dying, or disowning what she was.

Yet who am I, faithlessly, to judge

the nature of her further pilgrimage?

She’s gone before me once again, within

a space that I can only entertain:

beyond submission and obedience;

and certainty, perhaps; but with a sense

(being who she was), that being true to truth,

however bleak it seems, itself is faith.

For Stephen Prickett

on reading his “Narrative, Religion and Science: Fundamentalism

versus Irony, 1700-1999”

As students more than forty years ago,

we said, “Theology is poetry

that’s masquerading as philosophy,”

not knowing what we meant in saying so –

and now you do. You argue irony

is not a weapon against others, but the act

of doubting wisely what, in fact,

one knows – one only knows provisionally.

You say, in every field from science to

theology and literature, exist

two stances, the fundamentalist

and the ironic: the former claims to know

some ‘truth’ or absolute for fact; the second

finds facts are problematic. We only know

knowledge is always incomplete, and so

things (and we) are never what we reckoned.

And yet provisionality implies

some final Urgrund or Platonic ‘real’,

which though unknown, unknowable, is still

more certain than undoubted certainties.

[I’ve still to be wholly convinced by that,

since, rather, it’s the recognition of

provisionality implies belief

in final truth, not truth itself. And yet

I like to think of T. S. Eliot,

after an evening with some Marxists, where

he commented: “The difference is that they’re

so certain they are right – but I am not.”]

You argue language is a medium which,

for all its organically slippery,

disjunct relation with reality,

eventually exposes lies as such

and so is covenanted in some way

to truth as absolute – so witnessing

to the existence of God. To argue ling-

o-ontologically, thus, leaves me

troubled, since, when you say that statements are

subject to checks against reality,

truth’s slipped in in the checking, covertly,

and so the argument is circular –

as is your larger argument because,

beyond knowledge that is provisional,

you smuggle in as simply logical

what you believe in and assume, which is

a correspondence theory of truth –

in which, ironically, there is no place

from which to view the correspondences.

And so the final irony is faith.

Or so I think I think, since here I feel

out of my depth. Perhaps the point is, doubt

that is not lazy can becomes a sort

of faith, when only doubt seems possible.

Whatever. Despite doubts – rather, because

of them – you’ve helped me think, and see my own

little thoughts and unbeliefs within

the context of the wider centuries.

And so, you’ve done what you have always done,

widened my world, both with ideas and with

the fizz you bring to things, so making life

more stimulating, serious – and fun.

(Stephen said this was the best criticism of the book that he had read)

When we were very young

(For Stephen Prickett on our fiftieth birthday)

When we were children, Andrew’s Liver Salts’

best known advertisement was of a man

in his pyjamas, washing; behind him showed

his shadowy double, prompting him – he halts

like one who’s touched by conscience. Of the shelf

in front of him, the Andrews. The caption ran,

“Inner Cleanliness Comes First.” You crowed,

“That’s you and me – and I’m your better self!”

And I believed you – I half-believe you still.

It was the Wesleyan echo in the phrase,

of “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,”

and that familiar haunting of the will

by an unseen, all-seeing bugaboo,

that gave your joke-assertion power to faze.

Though now I think you said it not to impress

but, rather, reassure yourself of you.

Twin cousins, Geminis, perhaps we’re each

only a partial self – at any rate,

that is the case with mre; a negative

constrains me never to attempt my reach,

and keeps me (relatively) squeaky-clean –

but as for Godliness, I’m reprobate!

If I’d a better self, I’d rather live

wing-heeled and silver-quick and libertine!

Tidying my Study…

for Stephen Prickett

“Of making many books there is no end”– Ecclesiastes 12:12

While tidying up my study, I’ve just found

a letter from you, fifty-odd years old,

from when we were still young  –  still young and bold.

Or if not bold, then with a future still,

unmapped, perhaps a promised New Found Land.

You said that you’d be Coleridge to my

being Wordsworth – over-flatteringly,

I thought, even then. You had the mind and will

to achieve, and carved a Coleridgean career

between theology and literature –

a territory you own; while I have four

slim volumes to my credit – that is all,

and all my words are worth. It’s not, I fear,

any of it, worth a hill of beans when seen

sub specie etcetera.  But then,

we also serve who tend our gardens still!

  

Veuve Fouché

Jalousies and jealousies, flame trees

and heat. I sit here, rocking gently on the stoop,

hearing the rattle of the mop-topped palms,

the prattle of tittle-tattle in the street.

In the verandah’s shade, the net hammock

swings in the sea breeze, empty, a sail

without a boat, a boat without a cargo, shaped

not by her young body but by the heavy air.

I hear them saying, “Veuve Fouché sits there

in the sight of all. Has she no shame

after what she let happen under her roof?

She, who was the salt of the earth, a rock

in our congregation. Some even say

that she encouraged it.” And if I did?

If I am satisfied, it is not for myself.

I have lost the staff of my age, my grandchild.

I have done my duty by her, set her up

for life with the young minister, Pastor Picot,

a man of education, for a life away from here,

in England, America, who knows where?

Who is to say it was not Providence

brought him, sick of a fever, to my house?

Who is to say it was not my medicines

saved him? Who is to say Alice was not meant for him,

as she washed him, fed him, tended him

as he grew stronger? Fourteen is a ripe age,

still young enough to be moulded.

And now she is ripe with child

though it does not show in the photograph

sent from Louisiana, stiff stuff up to her neck,

no expression, only the left hand carefully

carelessly draped to show the new ring.

The new pastor with his young bride – which way

will the wind blow for them? Whichever way,

it will not be the relentless, gossiping wind

of home. It will not bring them home to Haiti.

(Pastor Picot and his young wife, Alice Fouché, were Stephen’s and my great grandparents.)

The Possibility of Innocence

for Stephen Prickett

As boys, we crooked ourselves in the plum tree

and gorged on the ripe fruit – plush purple, flesh

plump and lush, the fresh juice sharply, sweetly

dribbling down our chins in its excess.

We spat each stone out as far as we could

explosively, angling it up, to try

to reach the river, drop the stone where rudd,

shoaling in the shallows, lazily

wafted their orange fins beside the green-

haired weed, to keep their station in the flow.

Such was the eternity of boyhood when

time stood still and all was well – for so

it seemed – like the eternal afternoon,

when a friend and I, new sheath knives hitched

on our belts, cycled to Shay Woods, and in

a quarry found some sapling silver birch

and with our bright blades hacked them down until

we had enough to build our wigwam, where

we played out fantasies of a new world

of freedoms, living in the woods on air.

            *                      *                      *

Thomas Traherne and Wordsworth variously

interpret childhood glories. I’m inclined

to the constructivist psychology

precursed by Wordsworth – how the growing mind

builds sensibility and concepts from

experiences felt, as Wordsworth put it,

‘along the blood.’ But still, Thomas Traherne

says things about the consolation that

our memories (and nostalgia) can

provide as we grow old – if not a glimpse

of heaven, at least, a sense of what has been,

a possibility of innocence.

Miranda

Diana Prickett, née Mabbutt, 1941-2011

At Cambridge, we baptised you with cold tea

“Miranda” because it seemed appropriate.

While still ourselves untried, untested, we

all loved your innocence and wonder at

the world. And when I left for India,

you gave me a recording that you made

specially, since you knew I loved Pooh Bear

and, most particularly, how you read.

Later, divorced, your back a rack of pain,

you still felt married since the promises

that you had made were life-long. Called upon,

like Ruth in ruth, you tended to your ex’s

mother as your duty. Yet once you led

a School Inspector in her Gucci shoes,

with wellied class, deliberately through mud

to go pond-dipping, glorying in the ooze.

But what I like to think about is when

we four, on an islet in the Hebrides,

paddled on white shell sand in glorious sun   

and inch-long flat fish nibbled at our toes.

You are the first of us to have voyaged on

to gaze in wonder at the Hesperides,

to find your father Prospero and win

the golden apples as your Pooh-sticks prize.

(Miranda was Stephen’s first wife)

Family Tree

for Stephen on our 81^st birthday

A family tree is always incomplete:

it has a future; and our present will,

in that future, be a part of it.

Names, dates, marriages outlast us all.

Our branching progenies will separate,

and forebears can be seen as homing in

on us – our mothers sisters – and one date

of birth that makes you my sobrinal twin.

But nothing in that waist of time foretells

the more-than-brother that you are to me,

our life-long camaraderie-with-bells –

my ‘better self’, as you once claimed to be!

Leaf-fall will leave our names and date behind

but nothing of our summer of one mind.

(Written knowing Stephen was terminally ill)

Words for my burial

Here I submit my body to the earth.

The discipline of silence and the worm

(that pink and shrinking sleeve of flesh) confirm

what’s in the earth, with earth within, in death

enjoys no consolation, oxygen

to touch with love a loved one, speak a word

to touch a heart or write. It is absurd

to dream, within these words, I live again.

So is there consolation in the word

written in anticipation? Yes,

in that, in making, what one makes is peace

with and within oneself – deferred

acceptance and a feeling that the word,

if so composed, may, for what it’s worth,

catch at some gleam on shared and polished earth

above this body, soil or seed, interred.

These poems come variously from An Invitation to Supper (Outposts, 1978), Crooked Smoke (Graft Poetry, 2011), The Naming of Things (Poetry Salzburg, 2015) and The Possibility of Innocence (Graft Poetry, 2019). The penultimate is as yet uncollected.