'The Peacocks in the Arboretum' draft

 It's all music here these days, isn't it. It's not meant to be but that's the way it goes. Before we have yet more of that, finding this manuscript and finding it of interest, I'd like to indulge myself by including some words on it. Probably of very little interest to anyone except me and, on the wilder outskirts of possibility, some future professor who comes across my poems and decides that, after all, I was the defining voice of my generation of English poets.   !!!!

I included three manuscripts in the pdf Collected Poems by way of showing that when some of the best poems came they came fluently and naturally and needed very little later improvement. That is not to say that they were written immediately; the ideas had a few days if not weeks to take shape but the actual composition happened very quickly.

Not so with Peacocks in which the process was almost the other way round, the idea coming easily but the final version requiring some adjusting and fitting together. Still perhaps not as hard won as some poets who take months over such things but a more involved process for me than is usual. It is on the inside of an old envelope because the other side had a first version which at that stage was not made relevant to the occasion it was made relevant to. And that was reflected in how long it then took me to think it was worthwhile which it especially needed to be for the private, solemn occasion it was written for. As such, for the time being it remains unpublished but it has by now convinced me and so it could see print one day, somewhere.