If it's ever spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I when
Down the moor-cock splashed, and hen,
Seeing me now, amid their flounder,
Standing with my arm around her;
If it's ever spring again,
Spring again,
I shall go where went I then.
If it's ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay crop at the prime,
And the cuckoos - two - in rhyme,
As they used to be, or seemed to,
We shall do as long we've dreamed to,
If it's ever summer-time,
Summer-time,
With the hay, and bees achime.
From: Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, Macmillan, 1976.
This lilting lyric has a definite edge of melancholy underneath that musicality. It's interesting that he thought of himself as firstly a poet. I think, having read Tess recently, prior to teaching it later this month, I do prefer the poems! But it's always interesting teaching a novel about which you feel some ambivalence. Often I find that in the process of discussion I unearth bits of the novel that I really do love and feel quite differently about it after the classes end.
Do make your way over to the Tuesday Poem Blog and read Chris Tse's beautifully measured and elegiac poem about the SS Ventor. Chris Tse's debut collection, How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes is available in hard copy and as an ebook. Thanks to guest editor Renee Liang for bringing this exciting voice to our attention. From the Tuesday Poem hub, you can enter a rich world of poetry - immerse yourself! While there is much to be gloomy about in the world, at least there is poetry.
A blog where I talk about the reading, writing, post the Tuesday Poem and, sometimes, show some knitting.
1 comment:
I absolutely get that, about how teaching a piece of literature causes you to fall in love with it.
I taught Bruce Dawe's poetry to Year 12s, before which I had only really been exposed to the footy poem "Carn, carn....." By the second year of teaching it, I was unable to read through to the end of 'Katrina' without tears and a breaking up voice, which embarrassed the hell out of the class, as you can imagine.
I've also had the experince a couple of times where teaching something you loved after a cursory read, breeds contempt.
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