{"id":2402,"date":"2020-12-22T12:29:29","date_gmt":"2020-12-22T12:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2402"},"modified":"2020-12-22T12:31:14","modified_gmt":"2020-12-22T12:31:14","slug":"edmund-waller-a-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2402","title":{"rendered":"Edmund Waller – a memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 1963 or 1964 in South Africa. I\u2019m fourteen or fifteen. I\u2019m standing in my father\u2019s narrow, shabby and dusty study \u2013 feeling an acute sense of privilege and awe. This is his retreat, where he works away from the noise of family life and where he keeps his treasures \u2013 relics of his life in England, our childish drawings, our milk teeth. There are two crude, tight-packed bookshelves – one made of metal – and his greening academic gown with its moulting rabbit skin hood hangs on the door. There\u2019s a pile of yellowing newspapers several feet deep in a corner because he writes leading articles for our provincial newspaper several times a week. The window looks down on a precipitous front garden, then out over the park \u2013 once the municipal playing fields \u2013 across the road. The sun beats, the temperature is over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit, a Christmas beetle is shrieking in the willow. I\u2019m far away from all that, though. I\u2019m holding a little blue MacMillan hardback, HJ Massingham\u2019s A Treasury of Seventeenth Century English Verse<\/em>.\u00a0 My father has shown me \u2018To Phoebus\u2019, a bewilderingly allusive poem ascribed to my namesake Edmund Prestwich (\u2018Nothing is known of this very rare poet\u2019, says Massingham) but I\u2019m more interested in Edmund Waller, specifically in the second stanza of a poem Massingham calls \u2018Old Age\u2019. I find this so wildly thrilling that I repeat it aloud, and my father smiles quietly.<\/p>\n

How much of that is a conflation of different memories I can\u2019t say, nor even whether my father first showed me the Massingham in his study or our living room. I can remember that the book seemed to me like an almost holy object \u2013 it was very dear to him \u2013 and also how excited I was by the beginning of that stanza. I was bookish and dreamy, admittedly, but didn\u2019t read much poetry outside what we did at school, some Border ballads and the poems and songs in The Hobbit<\/em> and The Lord of the Rings<\/em>, so I think the way that stanza exploded in my mind is a real testimony to the direct workings of a certain kind of poetic power. Here it is as Massingham printed it:<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The soul\u2019s dark cottage, battered and decayed,
\nLets in new light through chinks that Time hath made:
\nStronger by weakness, wiser men become
\nAs they draw near to their eternal home:
\nLeaving the old, both worlds at once they view
\nThat stand upon the threshold of the new.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

What got me in those first two lines was the swiftness and absoluteness with which the image of the cottage appears, with its vivid chiaroscuro contrast of darkness and light, and the power of the meter \u2013 those runs of heavily stressed syllables with the spondees at the start of the line (\u2018SOUL\u2019S\u00a0 DARK COTtage\u2019, \u2018LETS IN NEW LIGHT\u2019. Of course I had no idea of analysing metre, I could only feel it. And I\u2019m not sure now whether I grasped the doubleness of the cottage image. I\u2019m sure I saw the cottage from outside as a shadowy shape in the darkness with light streaming out of cracks and windows. I don\u2019t know whether I saw it at all from inside, as a dark claustrophobic enclosure letting in little glimmers of a light by which it was surrounded. I now realise that that must actually be the main point of the metaphor. I think the other image has its own validity, though \u2013 it expresses the triumphant sense that compared to a young man the old man has more of the light inside him, kindled by his greater attention to the light outside. But what thinking about that early experience makes me feel is how much my response to poetry has always been essentially a response to rhythm and cadence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s 1963 or 1964 in South Africa. I\u2019m fourteen or fifteen. I\u2019m standing in my father\u2019s narrow, shabby and dusty study \u2013 feeling an acute sense of privilege and awe. This is his retreat, where he works away from the noise of family life and where he keeps his treasures \u2013 relics of his life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-edmund-waller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2402"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2402"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2405,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2402\/revisions\/2405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}