Handel , G. John Rivers , T. Which she really is — because reading and writing so little has given her a distinct advantage over me when it comes to sharpness and sanity. Because of course she can see ghosts and things like that which is a great advantage because they terrify her and make her refrain from doing or saying anything stupid or risky. I mean, she could have made up ghosts and spirits like I do instead of being careful never to look in their direction what is more to mention their names.
Or sat up and read what his very young wife George wrote down restless beside him on their honeymoon, as if she were Ishtar or the Angel Gabriel descended on the Ashdown Forest Hotel? And how we love the really great ones for being soft in the head like that, neurasthenic even, connecting nothing with nothing. How they expose us and redeem us, and make us whole. Much Madness is divinest Sense — ………………….. To a discerning Eye — ………………….. Much sense — the starkest Madness — …………………..
In this, as all, prevail — ………………….. Assent — and you are sane — ………………….. And handled with a Chain —. Which is why I write as well, as if my desk were underground in Lascaux — as if the hunt depended on my depiction of the beauty and grace of the animals as well as my reverence for them.
And even the sun rising. With that in mind, can you imagine Emily Dickinson out for a walk on the treacherous, ice-bound cart-road to Hay being rescued and steadied by Jane Eyre as if she were the one who was mounted? The clatter of the hooves and the crash? The neat little boots and the hot breath of the gytrash on your neck? For the Rogue himself do you name him, tumbling on the causeway at your feet? And can you see then how the truth is more important than the facts? Can you go somewhere you can never be but you have to arrive at — where everything that has ever happened happens to you for the first time alone in your room upstairs?
The moon girdling a softer quarter — ………………….. The impossible return, ………………….. Ocean fins quickening the landlocked water. March 27, at pm. For such poetry makes me stop in my tracks and read it again right away, as the first little poem certainly did when I stumbled on it the other day, and the other has been going round and round in my head for over 60 years. And then I start reading that poem in turn, over and over again. Indeed, you may even recall what I said about it here — and quite seriously, I do still find it interesting.
