Charles Tomlinson
Instead Of An Essay
for Donald Davie
Teacher and friend, what you restored to me
Was love of learning; and without that gift
A cynic’s bargain could have shaped my life
To end where it began, in detestation
Of the place and man that had mistaught me.
You were the first to hear my poetry,
Written above a bay in Italy:
Lawrence and Shelley found a refuge once
On that same coast - exiles who had in common
Love for an island slow to learn of it
Or to return that love. And so had we
And do - you from the far shore of the sea
And I beside a stream in Gloucestershire
That feeds it. Meeting maybe once a year
We take the talk up where we left it last,
Forgetful of which fashions, tide on tide -
The buddha, shamanism, suicide -
Have come and passed.
Brother in a mystery you trace
To God, Ito an awareness of delight
I cannot name, I send these lines to you
In token of the prose I did not write.
Was love of learning; and without that gift
A cynic’s bargain could have shaped my life
To end where it began, in detestation
Of the place and man that had mistaught me.
You were the first to hear my poetry,
Written above a bay in Italy:
Lawrence and Shelley found a refuge once
On that same coast - exiles who had in common
Love for an island slow to learn of it
Or to return that love. And so had we
And do - you from the far shore of the sea
And I beside a stream in Gloucestershire
That feeds it. Meeting maybe once a year
We take the talk up where we left it last,
Forgetful of which fashions, tide on tide -
The buddha, shamanism, suicide -
Have come and passed.
Brother in a mystery you trace
To God, Ito an awareness of delight
I cannot name, I send these lines to you
In token of the prose I did not write.
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- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
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- Lamport Court
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- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
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- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
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- Private Tutor
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- Quarto
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- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
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- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
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- Ugly Tree, The
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- Yellow Crane, The