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Candia Comes Clean

~ Candid cultural comments from the Isles of Wonder

Tag Archives: River Test

School Picnic at The Lawn, Whitchurch (80th Anniversary of The Battle of the Somme)

06 Thursday Nov 2014

Posted by Candia in Family, History, Poetry, Social Comment, Summer 2012, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Heilly, Lord Denning, Master of the Rolls, Remembrance Sunday, River Test, Somme, The Lawn, Whitchurch

(A re-blog of a poem written some years ago, but which

is of current interest with Remembrance Sunday

approaching.)

Brigadier wheat gilds the road from Somborne,

ready for reaping, caressed by the wind

and somnolent poppies, marginalised,

incline their bloody heads in remembrance,

while cornflowers, blue as a young man’s eyes,

or forget-me-nots, blink from future swathes.

In Whitchurch Lord Denning reminisces

about his brother, Jack, whose final note

was pencilled home before the telegram’s

bombardment.  This was a lifetime ago.

That name was stamped in tin, tacked to a cross

somewhere in Heilly.  Master of the Rolls,

you lived for your country; he died for it.

These rolling downs, now ripe with swaying crops,

owe their existence to a million

casualties: the blossom of Europe’s manhood;

mown down for twelve muddy kilometres

and a nonagenarian who claims

an Englishman’s home is his castle.

Boys with Supersoakers, artillery

fuelled by Test water, are trigger happy,

running to and fro like mad, bunkered rats.

Their aged host watches the annual tug-of-war

between sides formed from the same public school.

They strain to win, heels well dug in, entrenched,

trying to etch their team on Honour’s roll.

Something about healthy competition,

obligation, a new generation,

is the substance of his annual speech.

When all have gone, he thinks of five brothers

for whom the tug of war was not a game

and of the one who was pipped to the post

before he’d had a chance to fire his round.

His walking stick prods a discarded vest.

A shrill skylark, startled in the trees,

explodes a petal shower overhead

Lord Denning

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Wherwell

24 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by Candia in Architecture, History, mythology, Poetry, Politics, Religion, Romance, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aethelred the Unready, Black Death, Blessed Euphemia, cockatrice, corpse lights, Eadgyth, Edgar the Peaceable, Edward the Martyr, Elfrida, gloworms, Green's Acres, Matilda, Queen Emma, River Test, Romsey, Wherwell, William of Ypres

Wherwell - geograph.org.uk - 193057.jpg

Hi!  Candia here.  You might have been wondering where I

have been.  That Augustus Snodbury guy and his friends

have taken over my blog.  What a silly old buffer he is.

Strange, but he has quite a following.

Well, it’s sunny and I have been out of doors, visiting a few

choice locations.

One Saturday I simply HAD to go to Wherwell, to walk in

peace and to go into the church.  The River Test is beautifully

clear and the black and white cottages are stunning.

The history of the location is enthralling too.

I bought a booklet in the church and brooded on its contents

for a few weeks until I felt ready to hatch out my impressions,

in the discipline of iambic pentameter.

Here is the evocation of my mood and crystallised thoughts:

 

WHERWELL ABBEY- HAMPSHIRE.

 

 

Once in the abbey crypt, a duck-laid egg,

hatched by a toad, emerged a cockatrice,

which gorged on locals, till one man

took polished steel and dazzled this same beast.

Fighting its own reflection, it grew tired,

enabling Green to dispatch it forthwith.

 

Green’s Acres was the spot and there, at night,

an evening curfew tolled for many a year,

reminding all to seek those higher things;

show loyalty to their king, by offering up

archers and billmen for his war with France.

 

Queens Emma, Eadgyth sought their refuge here.

Elfrida, its first abbess, fell and drowned

in that same River Test.-she who deceived

her king and wed his servant, Aethelwold,

causing Edgar the Peaceable to kill

his rival, David-like.  And then himself,

hoist by his own petard, by his own son,

Edward the Martyr, bloodily usurped

by Aethelred, known as ‘The Unready:’

a ten year old, whose conniving mother

found the gates of Salisbury shut her out.

Ethelred the Unready.jpg

She turned around and, to atone her sins,

founded the sacred abbey of Wherwell.,

where the Blessed Euphemia re-built

dorters to benefit the claustration

of nuns who possessed their vessels, holy,

in sanctification, in conditions

sanitary, to repel the Black Death.

Later Matilda would meet her defeat

by Stephen, as she tried to cross the Test-

cousins at war.  She’d besieged the Bishop

at Winchester.  No sanctuary was found

for her guards, as they took abbey refuge.

William of Ypres showed no mercy when

refusal to surrender guests was tried.

Flushing them out with fire was his response.

Empress Mathilda.png

Corpse light glow worms pinpoint water meadows

where chaste ones once cultivated snowdrops

to cure the sick, or light the way

ambulant dead should trace through the mizmaze,

to leave behind corporeality-

a transformation more elevated

than Romsey sisters fleeing from the Danes;

losing their way in unfamiliar woods;

reproaching the Almighty and finding

their voices turn to those of feral cats.

 

Be still at dusk and sense those shifting eyes;

listen and one can hear the meowing cats.

 

 

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The First Cuckoo?

17 Monday Mar 2014

Posted by Candia in Arts, History, Humour, Literature, Music, Nature, Poetry, Social Comment, Suttonford, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Birdsong, Bradford, Delius, Desert Island Discs, First Cuckoo, garden warblers, Gaugin's Nevermore, Grainger, Grez-sur-Loing, Grieg, Jelka Delius, Lark Ascending, laughing thrushes, Messiaen, orchard orioles, Philip Hobsbaum, Quartet for the End of Time, Richard Hickox, River Test, Skylarks, Solano, Stalad VIII-A, T S Eliot, Vaughan Williams, Yorkshire Post

Birdsong, Brassica said,  It’s so lovely to hear the wildlife out and about,

making their nests.  I could have sworn that I heard a cuckoo when I was

out walking Andy with Castor and Pollux at the weekend.

(The dog has the more sensible name.  Mythology only affected her

twins.  Badly, some might say, as their nicknames at school are Bastard

and Bollocks!)

People were always competitive to report the first time a cuckoo was heard in

a given year, I remarked.  I saw a posting on YouTube which demonstrated a

very early instance on the first of March this year.

Isn’t there a piece of music about skylarks which was voted the most

popular choice for the nation’s Desert Island Discs? mused Brassie,

nibbling a watercress scone.

Yes, The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams, I informed her.  But I

once sang a lot of Delius under the baton of Richard Hickox and it stirred

my interest in the latter composer.  Of course, he was not the only

musician interested in birdsong.  Messiaen was the one who most obviously

springs to mind, with his precise references to garden warblers, orchard

orioles and laughing thrushes.

Wasn’t he the one who was able to have his work performed in Stalag

VIII-A camp, near Dresden?  Brassie asked.

Yes, under the auspices of a sympathetic guard.  But we were talking of

Delius, I reminded her.  I was so surprised to learn that he had been born

in Bradford.

A lot of people are, Brassie munched on.

She is incredibly fatuous at times!

Anyway, when I heard a cuckoo the other day, it reminded me that I

had..

written a poem about one, said Brassie laughing and showing that she

is fairly perceptive after all.  E-mail it to me later tonight if you want. 

I haven’t read one of your poetic compositions for a while.

Okay, I promised. I had the idea when I was walking by The River Test

one day a few years ago.  Just to let you know: his wife was called Jelka.

My Lit Theory teacher, the great Philip Hobsbaum, would have challenged

that the poem should be clear in its meaning without notes, Brassie

teased.

Thomas Stearns Eliot by Lady Ottoline Morrell (1934).jpg

Well, that writes off T S Eliot then, I countered.  So, I will just have to be of

the devil’s party!

On Hearing My First Cuckoo in Spring

 

Two notes transported me to Picardy,

for this birdcall, with its insistency

was a clarinet conceptualised

by a syphilitic man, who, near-blind,

was propped in his wheelchair in Grez-sur-Loing.

His Gaugin Nevermore had then been sold;

Grieg’s Scandinavian scenery mere

pointilliste impressions.  Now sound was all-

the lapping of the river at the end

of his garden; his giggle at the church

when he broke out at his confirmation;

the rhythms of his poet friend, Verlaine;

those Negro spirituals he’d overheard

through the cigarillo smoke in Solano,

when the grove could have been a kind of grave;

Grainger’s laugh; Heseltine’s accusation;

Fenby’s chords; a populous city’s noise;

the barking of the dachshund he once gave

to a favourite sister those years ago;

the rustle of his father’s Yorkshire Post:

(I see that Fritz has given a concert);

the sound of spiteful stones smashing shutters

and soldiers’ boots searching out their wine hoard.

In the New Year they made his cuckoo sing,

but by Autumn it sang over his plot,

laurel-lined in Lingfield.  Jelka heard it,

tumour-riddled, from the nursing home.

That day they sent her a boxed-set greeting

on a gramophone recording, but found

she’d already heard it; flown to meet him.

Now as I walk along this river bank,

the trite threnody does not interrupt

the inexorable ongoing flow

of Life itself.  This is what makes us rapt:

what Delius sensed, and helped us to know-

that two notes must not usurp the whole scale.

 

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My name is Candia. Its initial consonant alliterates with “cow” and there are connotations with the adjective “candid.” I started writing this blog in the summer of 2012 and focused on satire at the start.

Interspersed was ironic news comment, reviews and poetry.

Over the years I have won some international poetry competitions and have published in reputable small presses, as well as reviewing and reading alongside well- established poets. I wrote under my own name then, but Candia has taken me over as an online persona. Having brought out a serious anthology last year called 'Its Own Place' which features poetry of an epiphanal nature, I was able to take part in an Arts and Spirituality series of lectures in Winchester in 2016.

Lately I have been experimenting with boussekusekeika, sestinas, rhyme royale, villanelles and other forms. I am exploring Japanese themes at the moment, my interest having been re-ignited by the recent re-evaluations of Hokusai.

Thank you to all my committed followers whose loyalty has encouraged me to keep writing. It has been exciting to meet some of you in the flesh- in venues as far flung as Melbourne and Sydney!

Copyright Notice

© Candia Dixon Stuart and Candiacomesclean.wordpress.com, 2012-2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Candia Dixon Stuart and candiacomesclean.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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