I HAVE returned, at last, from my Arthurian and other peregrinations, and have been reunited with my little boat on the Norfolk Broads. Slipping her from her moorings and floating out on Ranworth Broad is always balm to my soul and feels like a homecoming.
I reacquaint myself with old friends: the pair of crested grebes who keep watch by Ranworth Dam have mostly reared their young; and I see the adolescent birds, more confident now, but still with the ruffled stripes on their necks, as though they were wearing feathery pyjamas. The grey heron, motionless as a grey hermit, still keeps his watch and station “like nature’s patient sleepless eremite”, as Keats said of the sea. A little further out, as I sail along the Bure, I am greeted by a cormorant and a pair of wild geese flying low overhead. These old friends at once relieve and enhance my solitude.
And it’s the solitude I’m after. I enjoy taking part in public events, and there is enough of the extrovert in me to be energised by them. But, after a while, they become draining. I wouldn’t compare myself to Yeats in any substantial way (it would really be “comparing the ridiculous to the sublime”), but I understand something of his sense of surprised estrangement when he finds that he has become “a sixty-year-old smiling public man”.
That poem, “Among School Children”, has a really extraordinary arc of development, as it springs away from its initial setting in a poet’s school visit:
I walk through the long schoolroom questioning . . .
— the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.
But that’s just the launch pad, and then he’s off on one of the strangest, densest, and most allusive of his poems. A supernatural swan swims into the very next verse, as he dreams “of a Ledaean body, bent Above a sinking fire.” Then, his mind is full of Leda, or is it Maude Gonne? He wonders what she might have looked like as a child:
I look upon one child or t’other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age —
And then, of course, he thinks of his own youth, now shrunk with age:
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once — enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.
And, after that, he’s off with Plato, Aristotle, the Quattrocento — all the usual suspects:
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things
But he ends his musings not on some note of detached philosophy, as might befit the “sixty-year-old smiling public man”, but on life and growth, on music, and, lastly, on the poem’s final, always unanswered, endlessly open questions:
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
Malcolm Guite is keynote speaker at “Finding Inspiration in the Psalms”, on 2 October in York. Visit the Church Times events page for more details and tickets
