Twilight III

One thing that Twilight won't be is a 'sequence'.

I seem to have written three poems that can take Twilight as their title and so, if they eventually appear anywhere together, they might be called I, II and III. And it isn't beyond possibility that there might be a IV or more. I don't know. How am I supposed to know.

But I abhor with the abhorence of a saint the idea of a 'sequence'. You've either got a set of related poems or you have a long poem in parts. A 'sequence' is the sort of thing a 'progressive' act from the early 1970's would try to sell their new LP on, as if it gave it some artistic integriry, or, more recently, what one or two contributors to the Poets on Fire Forum would say, which was, 'when I'm writing a sequence'.

Well, baby, save yourself the trouble. Don't.

Shakespeare's Sonnets, Paradise Lost, The Waste Land, et al. They weren't sequences. They were, respesctively, a collection, a long poem and a poem.

Oh, yes. Twilight III.  Just one more poem I'd like to call Twilight, really.

Twilight 

III

What is it that creeps through the dusk

with no destination or time

of arrival in mind.  A glass

is waiting to be filled. The air

depends upon us for the chill

we know in it. And every sound

becomes more local. Things nearby

are immanent until the stars,

timid at first, are confident

enough and grow. And so many

old absences distil themselves

into the rich velvet of wine,

the sordid bitterness of gin.

I know they’ll never find me here.

View from the Boundary

My listening pleasure was enhancecd recently by an evening on Radio 4 Extra that consisted of vintage game shows. Wilfred Pickles was the genial host on the most popular entertainments of their day but my interest was more stimulated by Gilbert Harding who I had rarely if ever heard in action other than the television interview with John Freeman when the seemingly dry, old stick was reduced to tears.
He seemed quite personable in the episode of Twenty Questions that I heard and so I looked him up further and found not only this book but that a tabloid newspaper had once described him as 'the rudest man in Britain', though clearly in an age when the title was more easily achieved.
I try to review books within a reasonable time after their publication on this website and so I make an exception here for his reflections in Master of None (1958). In it, by way of offering, or declining to offer, advice to aspirant careerists, he surveys the world from the point of view of his experience. It is neither a lifestyle guide nor a biography but, in the manner of such a work from a very different time, he seems most sensible and if it was in any way curmudgeonly then, the world must have caught up with him since, because he is the most humane and dignified of commentators here and I find myself approximately 97% in agreement with him, our personalities coinciding on many points, not the least of which, in the chapter on 'The Boss',
I am temperamentally most unfitted for being a boss and, by temper, a most unsuitable, most unsatisfactory, subordinate.
So I must remember that if and when the time comes again that I am in search of paid employment I must remove this posting in case a prospective employer googles me to augment their understanding of the quality of my candidature for the vacancy they wish to fill.
As you might expect of such a document, it highlights just how much has changed but also how much remains the same from the time when I was born.
Another recent purchase that is providing great pleasure, although of an entirely different timbre, is also not a new release. The Fitzwilliam Quartet's box set of the Shostakovich String Quartets is a wonderful account of a series that could arguably be put alongside such canonical 'sequences' (I wish I could find a better word than that) as the Beethoven symphonies, the Bach cantatas, the Mozart operas or the Handel oratorios. They aren't quite a career-spanning account of Shostakovich's life because no. 1 here is from 1938, after the fifth symphony - for which I thank the booklet for pointing out- but they progress from quite free exuberance, through the darkness of war to a solemnity that is profound but always musically inventive. Shostakovich was a teenage hero of mine with nos. 3 and 8 here regularly played on casssette tapes but his stature has only increased for me in recent years with the Preludes and Fugues another tremendous exhibition of his varied musicality and I would dare to shortlist him on a very short list of the greatest of C20th composers.
The Fitzwilliam set is very fairly priced although considerably more expensive than the Brodsky's release of the Complete Quartets. For one as parsimonious, or at least as appreciative of a bargain, as I, it was hard to pass over a significant saving but the reviews of the two sets were convincing enough and I'm sure I've done the right thing because this is superb. One amateur reviewer on Amazon was suspicious of the Brodskys for listing their tailor as their fifth member but their doubts were supported by other comments about the recordings.
I hope the Brodskys aren't only about plush image and sartorial concerns because they are the highlight of the Portsmouth Fesivities this year and I am booked in at the Cathedral, http://www.portsmouthfestivities.co.uk/the-wheel-of-4tunes-the-brodsky-quartet/#more-1966. But I see that Shostakovich Quartet no.3 is on their wheel of lucky dip repertoire so I'll be hoping to be able to see if they can play it or not.
In a year that has so far offered less than the last few in 'must see' events or 'must read' books for me, my list of possibles for the Proms hasn't amounted to many either but, you never know, and I have made a note of Judas Maccabeus on July 19th in the Albert Hall and Roger Norrington with some French baroque in the Cadogan Hall on 28th. At least the first of these is outside of the Olympic Games period when I was planning not to be anywhere near London. Travelling the Circle line packed in among the world's finest athletes one might be in danger of catching steroids. But I won't be too Hardingesque if I can help it about this unaffordable commercial jamboree. I might even enjoy some of it but at present Mark Cavendish winning the bicycle riding event and Usain Bolt finally running all the way to the line to set  new figures for the 100 metres are the only two things I'm really looking forward to. Of course it would be good if that nice girl Jessica could do well, too.
I only chanced upon finding that James Shapiro has a three-part series on Shakespeare on BBC4, The King & the Playwright: a Jacobean History, continuing on from where his book on 1599 had roughly left us. It is surely well worth seeing and episode one was good for its background on the sources of Lear and some long overdue recognition of Timon of Athens. The fact that only stills were used from the Globe production of Timon suggests that it was never filmed but it was a memorable event.
I'm afraid that, somewhat perversely, my interest in Shakespeare in recent years has been more directed at the unwinnable debate on speculation on Shakespeare's life which realistically can only revolve around discrediting the speculations of others. In this programme, the mainly admirable Prof. Shapiro re-enacted a walk he told us Shakespeare would have made from Silver Street to a bookstall where he would have found the source material for Lear. He gave the impression that he was in Silver Street, which he couldn't have been because it isn't there. He also might have made it sound as if Shakespeare's plays were produced in our modern day Globe when he said 'here' while standing in it. Such casual remarks give the impression that we know more than we do and also give the pedant the opprtunity to pick fault . The beauty of it is that we are thus allowed to imagine but we are not allowed to pass off our imaginings as fact, which is a failing of almost every Shakespeare biographer.
But at least we are fairly sure that Shakespeare wrote Timon with Thomas Middleton and this was convincingly established. So, no, Shakespeare didn't write all of Shakespeare but that doesn't mean that anybody else wrote all of it. It only means that he collaborated with others from time to time, which as professional play writers, they were bound to do. They were somewhat less precious than we are now about attribution as long as they got paid. The programme made much of the increasingly dark themes in the plays of the 1600's. And so it will come as some surprise in the final programme, one imagines, that the last plays are suddenly full of reconciliation, magic and resolution in a completely new sort of play. Unless, of course, we think that a new, indoor theatre had been opened for which a new sort of play was written and, more than likely a new collaborator was brought in. Like John Fletcher or Philip Massinger. But I don't know. I just imagine.

The Magnetic Fields, Royal Festival Hall, April 25th.

The Magnetic Fields, Royal Festival Hall, April 25th.

It seems so late in the story of pop music that a support band hoping to make their way in it now appears touching and quaint. Three girls and two boys called Tender Trap had all their credentials in place with 60's pop harmonies, aspiration and enthusiasm and they were very good. Clearly the history of pop hasn't finished yet from the point of view of their age group. Quite fittingly, the sensibility was something like that of the early Magnetic Fields albums with gorgeous harmonies and retro aesthetic, as if anything can be anything but 'retro' by now. Most movingly, they finished on a cover of X-Ray Spex's Germ Free Adolescents.

Those of us mean enough to recognize it might be thinking that the Magnetic Fields are in a slow decline with each successive album providing fewer masterpieces than the last although somehow that is inevitable. Luckily they have a back catalogue of such quantity and quality that a completely wonderful set can be left in the dressing room and there's an utterly sensational one still to give. Yes, four or five songs from Love at the Bottom of the Sea underwhelmed in comparison with the classic titles and what wouldn't. Some of these are like exercises from a songwriting class, litanies of same rhymes from the rhyming dictionary made to fit, but done elegantly enough. This can be done to great effect but even Stephin is not Paul Muldoon or Roddy Lumsden when it comes to making it work properly.

There were outings for a few lesser known items from the early albums like Get Lost and The Charm of the Highway Strip and they were welcome but the major hits included here were Chicken with its Head Cut Off, The Book Of Love, Buzby Berkeley Dreams, No One Will Ever Love You, It's Only Time with the glorious All My Little Words in the encore and, until you hear them all lined up in the same set, you realize how easy it is to forget just what an oeuvre this is.

Many songs, perhaps in Bob Dylan fashion, were in new arrangements and Stephin, Sylvia and Claudia took the lead on pieces originally sung by one of the others, like Stephin singing Come Back from San Francisco,

Come back from San Francisco

and kiss me, I've quit smoking.

but there were further innovations, like Shirley now playing a ukelele and virtuoso guitar parts played by John Woo. Stephin sat at a harmonium with a synthesized mouthpiece that recalled Peter Frampton's heyday for a few of the horror-struck amongst us but mercifully he didn't use it much. In fact, he was as low profile as a lead man can be, but with such an ensemble to his right, he presumably takes the view that there's no point having a dog and barking yourself.  You wouldn't ever accuse him of the happy, endearing demeanour of Tender Trap but the lugubrious nature is well practiced and all ironies tacitly understood.

So although nowadays I have precious few contemporary popular music acts to compare them with, The Magnetic Fields are surely the best in the world. Surely by a distance.

Terry Eagleton - The Event of Literature

Terry Eagleton, The Event of Literature (Yale)

Having progressed from seats at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and through Manchester, Terry Eagleton now updates his thoughts on literary theory from the summit of the academic world, the English department at Lancaster.

Who would have thought that theory would ever become 'unfashionable' but the opening paragraphs here suggest that it has finally gone the way of so many ephemeral academic subjects for discussion that have come and gone in an ever accelerating need for novelty, edge and topicality, an unseemly hastening that necessarily makes each successive burning issue the more rapidly outdated.

It seems undue to regard such passing fancies as post-colonial studies, sexuality, ethnicity and cultural studies more 'radical', or, for that matter, semiotics, post-structuralism, Marxism or psychoanalysis, compared to the 'conservative opponents of theory' but if they have had their day then I'm sure their obsolescence was in-built.

While for the most part maintaining an acute awareness of the flaws in any given practice or thinking, Eagleton equally brings with him vestigial remnants of his soi-disant radical past. There is a lameness in his insistence of using the pronoun 'she', rather than the presumably discredited 'he', to denote such non-gender specific figures as 'the author' or 'the reader' when the usage of the singular 'they/their' is perfectly serviceable. And for one so forensically accurate in dismantling the terminology of others, it is surprising to find him refer to 'literary types' as if they were a species, as identifiable perhaps as a term used by John McCririck in the past, the 'each-way shrewdy'.

In the opening chapter that differentiates between Realists and Nominalists, I find that I am probably among the latter, along with Derrida and Foucault and other 'literary types', who are more commonly liberals than conservatives. Although only 35 pages earlier it had seemed I might be irredeemibly conservative if I wasn't a fully-paid up adherent of theory.

But, as a fairly literary type of philosopher himself, Eagleton makes his way through some labyrinthine arguments, clarifying with well-chosen illustrations and his trademark 'sardonic travesties',

without some measure of implicit meaning, no piece of writing could function at all. The sign 'Exit' tacitly requests us to take it as a description rather than an imperative otherwise theatres and department stores would be permanently empty.

Philosophy at its best is the highest form of humour and Eagleton is rarely more than a paragraph away from his next droll observation. The problem with the question, 'What is Literature', though, is that although it appears to be the same sort of question as 'what is a giraffe', it can't be answered in the same way. A giraffe has giraffe DNA, and can be identified with some confidence at a glance in any case, but literature is a man-made thing, has meant different things at different times and can still mean somewhat different things to different people. But if it weren't so then the finest minds in the country wouldn't be able to exercise themselves on such arcane questions and instead might have to address more pressing concerns like economic crises, wars and social problems that are generally left to the spivs and charlatans elected to do so.

Calling something 'literature' has often conferred approbation on it, something that Eagleton is well aware of but has difficulty getting away from. Having not accepted his definition of 'poem' in How to Read a Poem, I'm not keen to take his word on literature either. I know that there are such things as bad poems. I know that poetry is a part of literature. And so I believe that there can be bad literature. So many of our assumptions are only 200 years old, taken from the vast influence of Romanticism, and we haven't recovered from them yet.

But Eagleton does a great job in setting out the complex relationship between fiction and the real world, between what a literary work is and how it might be apprehended. We have the concept of sacraments that are things that 'fulfil their ends simply by virtue of the actions they involve', and praxis, a practice whose ends are internal to it, both of which seem useful in arriving at an idea of what a literary work is.

The work of art ...is an example of human praxis, and therefore of how to live well.

And so might this book be, which is, in itself, a literary work of a sort. In places it demonstrates how philosophy, with its sense of its own absurdity temporarily absent, can be little more than a chore, but it is the process involved as much as the answer, if any, arrived at that provide its meaning and justification. Philosophy investigates itself as much as it investigates anything else. We may not be much the wiser at the end of it but, if not, we feel as if we understand a little better why not.    

South 45

South 45, edited by Maggie Sawkins and Richard Williams

The cover photograph is usually among the best things about South and the picture of Brighton's West Pier by Brent Jones on number 45 is no exception. The production values of the magazine are peerless, the tone friendly and encouraging, the reviews generous and thus it deserves its long-established place in the poetry community.

I'm not sure how long it has been the case that the selectors of each issue nominate two of the poems for consideration for the Forward Prize for Best Individual Poem but I'd think it as unlikely as Steeple Sinderby Wanderers winning the F.A. Cup that any poem from South were ever to win that. For the most part the poems here are sincere, well-intended, personal and free of irony and if those are sometimes regarded as strengths then they are also limitations.

There are poems to like here and a few to admire, which makes it no different in those ratios to almost every other poetry magazine but these are devoted amateur poets in a community somewhat removed from the professional classes of household name poets and the Faber, Carcanet or other well-known lists.

Sharpnosed Fish by Chris Preddle immediately seemed to me more adventurous and interesting than the rest of the magazine and almost doesn't belong in it. Among a few poems that take paintings as their reference point, Willesden Sunset by Terry Quinn was the one I returned to to check if it was as good as I thought at first reading and I think it still was. Jill Sharp's Christchurch Bay takes on a form that wouldn't work for everyone and is successful with it and the featured poet here Finola Holiday has poems in her set that are worth a look. It remains one of South's best features that it gives so much space to a featured poet. The number of poems used would represent a booklet for someone with such frugal output as me but for the more prolific, it is a useful showcase and no poet can be understood in only one poem. It is a shame that out of three poems submitted by most contributors, South doesn't often use more than one and are prepared to say as much. I'd prefer it wasn't done like that.

I'm in this, which is why I have a copy but I'm buying another to send to Japan so I hope I'm supporting the cause. My magazine subscriptions have dwindled to a shameful nil in recent years because collections of poets one likes or wants to read provide better value. But in the very unlikely event of my poem being submitted to the Forward judges, I'd prefer to let someone else be selected. I don't feel as if I want to be in that league and such minor celebrity would be less comfortable than being no celebrity at all.

It's a godawful small affair

Tuning into the BBC's new series on the 70's, I am in sympathy with it here and here is a picture of me in that great decade.
I'm sure I could have found less flattering photos.

I don't understand why the 70's are so maligned. We still had Marxism then, making the place more interesting and philosophical, even if pathologically ideological at the same time. The programme makes the point that Arthur Scargill was Thatcherite before the fact, not much particularly socialist about him but simply out for what he could get.
I wish we still had it now. It went from glam rock to punk, with Motown and reggae proving more fruitful in the long run. David Bowie only shows himself to be more and more of a genius the more one looks back on him. It can't only be the age that I am that makes no subsequent decade seem as interesting.

It was a debate worth having. When one is young one thinks at least one side will win. But now you look back and try to work out who did win.
Nobody wins in the end. You need to make sure you are having a good time while it all happens around you. Is all, really.

Grand National Preview

I backed Giles Cross, not with very much money, at 33/1 a few weeks ago and so should now be quite excited that he is quoted at 12/1 third favourite.

If the promised rain fell on Liverpool in sufficient quantities then this would be one of my most confident selections in a career as Grand National tipster that goes back to the early 80's and, until recently, had an approximately 1 in 3 strike rate, with two horses most years and a couple of forecast bets landed in the process.

But we checked the weather forecast for Liverpool this morning and there isn't much more rain in it. And so it is literally, hold your horses. A downpour might make him 7/1 favourite and the best bet of the season but drying conditions would surely see him drift back out in price.

I stand to benefit if Calgary Bay gets round in front of the others. A fine, big horse who impressed last time out, but he is on the drift in the market and there seems to be a doubt about the four and a half mile trip.

The statistics don't encourage investment on 13 year olds but Black Apalachi is my idea of the perfect National horse and having been injured just before last year's race, he comes here with relatively few miles on the clock, apparently as forgotten as Mon Mome and Silver Birch were in their years but kept in training with this race specifically in mind.

I don't suppose you can get a price on the publicity stunt race disruption which made the best boat race for years a non-event last week. I appreciate the swimmer's point that the Boat Race is cruelty to dumb animals but they did somehow get into Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Yes, I dare say the fundamentalist might consider banning the use of animals for the horse jamboree but hunting, shooting and fishing would come ahead of it and, as a vegetarian, I'm smug enough in my belief that over a year, fewer animals die to satisfy my appetites than do for many others.

Top 6 - Adrienne Rich

So, I treated myself to a copy of The Fact of a Doorframe, Selected Poems 1950-2001, to belatedly put Adrienne Rich among those poets I can at least say something about.

One of those maxims or tenets that one can usually roll out quite lazily in the knowledge that it's usually true is that the best poets and artists develop from good beginnings to equally good or better mature work. Adrienne Rich certainly developed but all the poems I liked best in this book were in the first few pages, from the 1950's, and a couple from the 60's.

This is not to say that she 'lost it' or deteriorated, just that for me, the style of the earliest poems, somewhat more formal but unsentimental, was more successful than later, longer, more freely written pieces. But it's a fine book, all of it, and I am better late than never among her admirers.

Storm Warnings, At a Bach Concert, Ideal Landscape, Living in Sin, For a Russian Poet and Orion are six that I picked out, the first three especially.

Another poet who does that for me is Ted Hughes. He never did quite regain the initial impetus for me.

I expect at least some of that is heresy and that's one reason why the facility for others to place comments on this website is disabled.

Tibullus Elegies

Tibullus, Elegies, a new translation by A.M. Juster (Oxford)

The original Augustan Age in poetry included Vergil, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid. Among other things, it idealized a life of leisure in the country rather than going to war. But one comes away from reading Tibullus feeling that he never quite got his way in his short life.

He does not have Ovid's self-possession. Where Ovid seems to know what he wants and knows how to get it, or else he will dramatize his destitution, Tibullus paints himself most often as a victim of love and its situations. He is a meeker and less expectant personality although precisely how autobiographical these poems are can't be said for certain.

Book 1 of the Elegies might remind the reader of the shadowy story behind Shakespeare's Sonnets with their fair youth and dark lady and triangle of rivalry. Most of the book is devoted to Delia but, in a second episode, Tibullus appears to suffer when, in 1.9, his boy betrays him with an older, rich man whose wife dresses herself up for another younger man.

In Book 2 Tibullus is reluctantly involved in a military campaign and his ideals are compromised by necessity and civic duty. In love, he is also reduced in ambition, apparently more desperately in thrall to Nemesis but in 2.4, locked out by her madam, and given any excuse as to why he can't see her,

Whichever God gave beauty to a greedy girl,

alas, he brought much evil with the good,

and so the sobs and brawls resound; in short, it's why

Love is a god who's disrespected now,

Although Ovid is equally capable of theatrical tantrums in despairing moods, he is also bullish and confident whereas Tibullus only seems to cherish his dreams rather than believe in them and then they become tainted and degraded. But one can't help but like Tibullus even if he is overshadowed by his brash successor.

This translation by A.M Juster achieves a fine, lucid expression while maintaining the metrical pattern and so covers more than one of the several options and responsibilities of the translator. Robert Maltby's introduction and notes are also exemplary in this convenient and clear edition. As a compact version of the poet with useful context and background, one couldn't hope for any more. Highly entertaining, enjoyable and excellent.

Neil Powell - Proof of Identity

Neil Powell, Proof of Identity (Carcanet)

Neil Powell's new collection describes itself well enough. The theme of the book is an exploration of who he is and where he came from.

The Journal of Lily Lloyd is a 29 page story of his grandmother's itinerant life in 1920's South Africa, when his mother was born. It took a while to start to enjoy this narrative written in an act of ventroloquism but it grows in stature as one becomes asccustomed to its adopted voice. Don't get too attached to the horse. I knew it would end up getting shot.

Blackborough Park is nowhere near as long at 120 lines but still 'extended' by today's standards. But the 'long poem' is making a gradual comeback, like fish into a cleaned-up river. Few will so successfully make as much out of so little as this, which does no more than watch watch and speculate upon a few figures in a park but it works for me now as well as it did when it first appeared in PNR.

But, back with the thematic thread, the title poem considers some old photographs of the poet's father, loving and respectfully, but with enough in them to allow room for one or two questions.

And then The Break is a quietly moving poem about leaving the family home. Powell is never overstated and never ostentatiously clever. The more you read of him the more one appreciates that in him and is grateful. He does a nice 14 lines, the best of these being Kempas Highway, 1966, ending,

For first love never disappears: it sets,

A pearl one neither loses nor forgets.

But it's not the only one worthy of mention. In In Sudbourne Wood, there is,

A blackbird clacks and flaps at whatever has fired

His tiny anger.

There is a lot to like about this collection. There's always been plenty to like about Neil Powell's writing.

Top 6 Symphonies, selected by Phil & Mary Green

In special circumstances, this joint selection in our festival of symphonies has been allowed to run to seven. Those special circumstances are that the guests here are my mother and father and I don't want to be sent to bed with no tea on my next visit to them.

Beethoven: 7th. Noteable for being Richard Baker's signature tune on Radio.
Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique. Dramatic music
Brahms: 4th Particularly 3rd movement
Haydn: 94th Surprise As he wrote 107 (according to Groves) he's better have one in
Mendelssohn: 4th Italian Great minds think alike
Sibelius: 5th Great finish
Tchaikovsky: 4th Final movement exceptional and often played by a brass band as a finale

Top 6 Symphonies, selected by Dave Moxham

Mr. Moxham also included his choice of Symphonies.

And having been so remiss last time and not awarded his Jazz choices an illustration, here is a picture of Jean Sibelius, who I thought might show up well among the selections.

Sibelius 2nd
Shostakovich 11th
Beethoven 6th (Pastoral)
Glass 3rd
Gorecki 3rd (Sorrowful Songs)
and Dvorak 9th (New World)

Top 6 Jazz, selected by Dave Moxham

My friend Dave Moxham has been kind enough to enter into the spirit and provide his choice of Jazz, about which he makes it clear these are 'favourites rather than best',


Horace Silver ..................Song For My Father
Dave Brubeck .................Blue Rondo a la Turk
Thelonius Monk...............Misterioso
Barbara Thompson..........Country Dance
Charles Mingus ..............Goodbye Pork Pie Hat
Jan Garbarek .................Twelve Moons

Top 6 Symphonies

Following on from the BSO concert, Symphonies presented themselves as a topic for Top 6 consideration.
For the reasons outlined in the concert review, Beethoven no. 6, the Pastoral, is an automatic first choice. A teenage favourite but still magical and flawless after all those years, lyrical and powerful. Beethoven is difficult to overestimate and this has all the benefits of both his intense moods and his lightness of touch.
Sibelius is another certainty for the list and no.5 gets the first vote for its cold, clear description of Finland’s lakes and woodlands, its surging themes and leitmotifs. It is powerful as well as beautiful and it is already becoming clear that although my very favourite music comes from before 1800, the symphony, which as a teenager I thought was the Premier League of classical music, is a C19th and C20th thing, only developing to its fullest achievement when building on the earlier masterpieces.
The first LP I ever bought was the Waldo de los Rios Symphonies for the Seventies with its eight arrangements of classic repertoire pieces. Making classical music accessible in user friendly versions is usually quite rightly derided but Waldo did a faithful job on his selected victims. However, I wouldn’t have needed the inducement of his Schubert Unfinished, whatever number is assigned to it, to include it here. Spare, lucid and redemptive, I might say if I went and fetched my thesaurus. What would Schubert have gone on to achieve if he had lived to any sort of maturity is one of those mind-boggling questions which also applies to Mozart.
Waldo’s version of Mozart 40 was the first record I ever bought, in 1971, with its chart position of number 5 and the symphony has to be included for its seminal place in my own musical biography. Mozart, of course, sounds playful and inventive but even then, aged 11, I think it was the dark undercurrents of anxiety and doubt that made me realize that there was something else in all of his music. It isn’t cute, chocolate box music whatever a tourist trip round Salzburg might try to sell you.
And so, with only two places left, it’s already too late for some. I won’t include Mendelssohn only because I think he’s a massively under-rated composer and seems to be dismissed as somehow ‘lightweight’ against more grandiose Romantics. I’ll have the Italian Symphony, no. 4, even more for its soothing and lovely second movement Andante than its bright and lively start.
Gorecki no.3, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, makes up the half dozen. I turned on the radio one day last year, or maybe longer ago than that. I had no idea that it was on. I began to wonder if we had suffered a royal bereavement, so grieving and enormous was its effect, unintroduced and speaking only its own mournful language. I heard a great quote on the radio this week, I’m sorry I can’t attribute it to its author, about how music is too precise to be expressed in language. And that is right. It is why musicians will always be held in higher regard than mere writers or poets. Poets and painters are fine but you often have to sober them up a bit to get any sense out of them. Musicians have the rarest talent and the best of them inevitably put it to best use.

I had not thought death had undone so many

When I first came to Portsmouth and saw Kingston Cemetery for the first time I thought of Eliot's line in The Waste Land, 'I had not thought death had undone so many' and so still do now, whether seen from the train or from Copnor Bridge.

I'll keep a look out for any other pictures that illustrate lines from poems.

(I've found that if you click on a photo on here, it brings it up bigger and better.)