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PARTISAN REVIEW
three judges seated on the Bench. A rule was laid down at the start: there
were to be no references to the past, only to the present trouble. Apparently
it had not occurred to anyone at the BBC that British judges in wigs and
gowns deciding what to do about Ireland might be a cause of the trouble. Or
that in Ireland present and past are inseparable.
To walk on a road in Ireland or sit by the water is to be conscious of
the past. These stones are where a monastery used to stand, that field is
where the rebels were killed. Their ever-present consciousness of the past
makes for poetry ... the writing of a Yeats, a Patrick Kavanagh, a Seamus
Heaney.
We meant to stay for a year ... we stayed for two. But we had to
leave the apartment ... it was cramped and dark ... the room where we did
most of our living was below street level. We found a house for rent around
the corner. It had three floors and light came through the curtains.
The longer we stayed in England, the more there was to see. We
traveled to Bath to see the Roman ruins and to Stratford to see Peter Brook
direct Shakespeare. We went to Richmond to see the palace and Kew to see
the flowers. One Sunday we attended a service at Magnus Martyr close by
the Thames.
As
The Waste Land
said, the walls held "Inexplicable splendour
ofIonian white and gold."
On another day we were in Little Gidding, and this too was as Eliot
described it:
you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone.
A visitors' book in the chapel asked you to pray for some who were
sick and others who were troubled. Some lines by Eliot were on display to
remind you that there are more important things than sightseeing:
you are not here to verify,
Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
Or carry report. You are here to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.
An
appointment book that somehow has survived tells me that I gave
a poetry reading at the Hasmonean School; that I saw Ted Hughes and his
wife for lunch; that I recorded poems for the Greater London Arts Council;
that I had a drink with Derwent May; that I read for "Poetry International"
at Queen Elizabeth Hall and at "The Pindar of Wakefield" in Grays Inn
Road.
With Tony Rudolph and Dannie Abse I took part in a "festival of the
