Dreaming of Auden

 Nothing quite as boring as other people's dreams, is there. They are clearly the sub-conscious trying to sort out its baggage and anxieties, whether in obvious or symbolic ways, and while it's obvious that other people would dream about their obsessions, it's fascinating when we do so, so vividly, about our own.

This morning, in the last stages of R.E.M., I was back in Linden Huddlestone's sixth form class, circa 1977, and he had set us an exercise to write a poem that was a 'character study'. I immediately decided to write about Auden, sure that I could do it and knowing he had an interest in him. In the way that dreams mix up timescales, I probably wasn't aware that Mr. Huddlestone was an Auden admirer and I wouldn't have known enough about him to write the poem I might now, then. But that's neither here nor there.

I made a few notes of lines to put together to make my collage portrait and was confident I could make it work. But not necessarily before the end of the lesson when we might have to read it out or hand it in. But I was so sure I could do it that I thought I'd be fine saying, no, I haven't finished yet but I'll give it to you tomorrow and it'll be great. 

That was until I mislaid the notes I'd made and was desperately trying to reconstruct them. In real life, more than 30 years ago, I lost a poem, reconstructed it from memory, and then found the original and saw that they weren't very like each other. I was half re-making the fragments of the poem in a bit of a panic, knowing I'd miss the deadline and have to rely on my promise of a teenage masterpiece when I woke up.

The idea of the poem was still sharp enough for me to make approximations of a couple of lines once awake but I didn't write them. They've all but gone now. I could go back to the start and undertake the exercise all over again. Or I could try to remember the idea for a poem I had the day before yesterday which seems to have gone completely. Either way, if anything came of them I'd put them here but don't come rushing back in expectation. It's rare for poems to realize the idea of how good they'll be. The best are those that somehow turn out to be something different in the process of making them and are better.