As a Cloud

It's only once in a blue moon, or in this case a lonely cloud, that I have an occasional feature here of photographs that bring to mind famous poems. 

I'm no great Wordsworth expert, apologist or admirer but one couldn't help but notice this and think that loneliness isn't always a natural thing to attribute to clouds because they usually come 'not single spies but in battalions'.

Does nobody ever question the fitness of Wordsworth's simile or is it a bit picky to find fault with it because it's not a cliché. It's a poem everybody knows, especially its first line, but it's not about the cloud, it's about the daffodils and then more than them. The solitary cloud only represents the poet, deep in abstracted thought as a poet is expected to be. This one wasn't 'floating on high o'er vales and hills' but 'o'er Swindon' and, if we sometimes imagine we see pictures in them, like the bear smoking a pipe once perceived by Brian Wells, the late Portsmouth poet who succeeded in writing worthwhile haiku in English, then this one was Iceland in the blue, blue North Atlantic Ocean.

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It might seem impetuous to snap up on sight two CD's of pieces one already has but I wasn't sure I had them and charity shops can hardly give away that olde worlde music format these days. The catalogue of one's record collection one keeps in one's head becomes blurred so now I have two versions of both Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Charpentier's Lecons de Tenebres to compare. They cost £1 each. They could have cost £1 for all three discs but I simply couldn't take advantage of that offer. It was daylight robbery already for anybody who cared and it's possible nobody else in Cosham High Street ever would.

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But while compiling some sort of outline for a further scholarly essay that may or may not be aimed at the About Larkin journal, I looked up a reference from John Lucas and his Modern English Poetry - from Hardy to Hughes, Barnes & Noble, 1986, only very belatedly discover how prolific and right-minded the Nottingham novelist, academic, editor, critic and, it turns out, jazzman, really was.

There are the Burgundy Street Jazzmen, in which he played trumpet and cornet, to catch up on, maybe also the novels he continues to write into his 80's and his The Trent Bridge Battery, the Story of the Sporting Gunns, the dynasty that provided Nottinghamshire with players as well as bats. But, for the price of less than a pint of Shipstone's Ale in a pub, I thought I'd have Poetry: the Nottingham Collection (Five Leaves, 2005) in which he selects poems from contemporary poets associated with Nottingham and thus not Byron or Lawrence but a goodly few, none of whose contributions can compare with his own masterpiece, An Irregular Ode on the Retirement of Derek Randall, Cricketer, which in four stanzas of eight twelve-syllable lines of contrived doggerel does a better job of setting out the Randall story than Rags, the very underwhelming ghost-written biography.

Sport and literature are very different things and aren't always brought together successfully and Randall was heroic and highly loveable for what he did but it was never going to be writing. John Lucas provides an appropriate tribute in fittingly makeshift, knock-about style and for those of us for who there will never be another Derek Randall - and there had been nothing like him before- it's what we wanted. 

I'm glad I found it. I wouldn't have known of I hadn't looked. Derek became,

                          fit cause

of Arlott's measured words: "He made the method men look sad."

...

you were too rare a player for England, dear Derek Randall.