Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Feeling the loaded sack upon me, — the years solid, unstreaked by light —, music in my head and hands brought me up the path to The White Gates. R.V.W. admitted me himself, loosely clad, tie off-centre, massively egregious, and mysterious in dark, withheld force.

     I looked up and up; genius, power, intensity washed over me in a flood at silver fire. Instantly I was drawn into a great studio, rimmed by a gallery; the floor was nude; there were a number of ancient, over-stuffed chairs, each occupied by a stout, grey cat; a round table stood in the middle, and I noticed empty beer-bottles in the corner of the room. Sir George Dyson was expertly manpulating a copper kettle, preparatory to making tea.

     Several house-guests came up and spoke to me, and one elderly lady showed me some dolls’ house furniture she had been making. The focal point of the gathering was a surgical couch were Mrs. Adeline lay, her great eyes flowing in a perpendicularly-carved face, welcoming me; her twigged hands were beautiful and strangely eloquent in their deformity.

     After tea, Mrs. Adeline drew me over to her and recounted several amusing anecdotes of her husband’s life; the one I remember best was of an occasion when R.V.W. was dining with his mother in a restaurant, aged about sixteen; overcome by inspiration, he scribbled part of a score on the cloth under her approving eye; when they rose to leave, she casually peeled it off the table and bought it.

     R.V.W. took me away to play to him in a tiny study, one a green-silk-fronted cottage piano, with four dumb keys. Aghast, I wrestled with the Brahms Rhapsody in G minor, several Chopin Etudes and a Debussy prelude. When I had reached my shaking conclusion, he took me by the shoulders, staring long into my head, silently, searching. Then he said: ‘You should have been another Myra Hess, and it would still not be too late. You must study with a great teacher for two years. ’

     I thanked him, with black tears like dried blood-drops hooding my eyes, for I was thirty years old, and for me it had always been too late. He led me at last out of the rear garden, showing me his chickens; opening a low gate, he said, gaily: ‘When you visit me next, be sure to come this way; it is shorter.’

. . . . .

     I play my piano still, with none to hear, remembering an amber day, a great, outflowing mind, and a dying woman whose stern, structural beauty lies indelible upon my heart. I never saw Ralph Vaughan Williams again.