On This Island

On This Island

Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

Here at a small field’s ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide.
And the shingle scrambles after the suck-
ing surf, and a gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.

Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,
And this full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.

1935


W H Auden once described his face as resembling a ‘wedding cake left out in the rain’. Anyone as devoid of vanity as Auden (except where arch expression is concerned) has to be ok in my book.

The two best lyric poets writing in English in the twentieth century were Auden and W B Yeats. Yeats was a bit too up his own arse mystical Anglo Irish fuckwit for my liking, but he was immensely talented. Auden was a drawling upper middle class Oxonian, but he had an easy familiarity with the English language that enabled him to produce a seamless lyricism that hasn’t been equalled since.

I particularly like the way the Microsoft grammar checker has a head fit when I type some of his writing. Frankly, it’s a relief. There are far too many ‘technical writers’ out there producing sub literate blurbs describing the intimate functions of vacuum cleaners for my liking.