On the first of October we met at Helen’s to present our findings on ‘Journeys’ in Literature.

As Geoff had forgotten to bring ‘The Saga of Thørkil’ with him we launched straight into the main business.

Elaine started by telling us how she had come across the trilogy ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ which she chose to illustrate our theme by describing Bilbo Baggins’s journeys and trials in the latter novel.

Beti then read extract number three entitled ‘Usk’ from T.S.Eliot’s ‘Landscapes’. In this short, elliptical poem Eliot exhorts us to look beyond ‘The white hart over the white well’ (which Professor Philip Edwards of Liverpool University deems to be a warning not to go to seek epiphany inside the pub!), in this case, ‘The White Hart’ at Llangybi, to find spiritual answers or to rely on ‘Old enchantments’ like those in the Mabinogion and Arthurian legends. He urges us to ‘...Let them sleep’ and instead to seek for enlightenment in a pilgrimage to the humble Christian ‘Hermit’s chapel'.
She read from ‘The Old Ways, A Journey on Foot’ by Robert McFarlan where he described the various people he knew like the poet Edward Thomas who shared his love of the countryside.
Her third contribution was taken from Tim Dee’s ‘The Running Sky, A Bird Watching Life’ in which she illustrated the Liverpool born, BBC producer’s lyrical use of words in describing the wild-life on his journeys.

Suzanne’s choices were both by Wendy cope. The first calls up the sulky attitudes of Harry Enfield and Kathy Burke’s teenagers from television! It was called ‘The Concerned Adolescent’ and in it, in the voice of the disaffected teenager, the beauty of the earth is described as seen from space in all its glory until the last line of the first two stanzas when we learn that “It is doomed”. He/she goes on to tell us that seen from another galaxy “beings are discussing the problems of earth”. Their leader sees the exceptional beauty of our world and then says: “But it is doomed”. It explains that the problem with it “Is the inhabitants known as HUMAN BEINGS”. Everything they do is disastrous and “They do not understand their young, they reject their ideals,
they make them come home early from the disco
They are doomed”. In the last stanza the teenager returns to her own voice saying that a great disaster will soon wipe out all life on the earth
“including those people who do not see how
important my poem is
They are certainly doomed”.
Suzanne’s second one called ‘On a Country Bus’ is ultimately addressed to her partner. She starts by observing “The fat boy in the seat across the aisle” who is listening to “something dreadful on his Walkman” and reading. She doesn’t feel the need for listening to music or reading herself as she is a relaxed, untroubled and decides to think “... about the things you say and do
And nothing else”. She ends by telling us that the trip takes almost an hour.

Helen’s first contribution was a poem by Brian Patten, one of the ‘Liverpool Poets’ (along with Adrian Henry and Roger McGoff), called ‘The bee’s last journey to the rose’. In this beautiful short poem we join the busy bee on his last journey through the  cool autumnal evening as he thinks about early Spring when he moved easily through the warm grass “Humming with Spring”. Now on his last journey he is tired and says that it feels like swimming through a green ocean. He appeals to the cold North wind to wait until he has reached his destination and says:
“Let me be drunk on this scent a final time
Then blow if you must”. It makes one think of Dylan Thomas and his “Rage, rage at the dying of the light”.  
Helen’s second was taken from Devla Murphy’s book ‘Full Tilt’ about her remarkable journey to India, all on her ordinary, day-to-day bicycle. We learnt that she had always wished to make this journey and knew that one day she would do it and so she did, with little fuss and few creature comforts, just the essentials like a small revolver!

Diana entertained us with two poems, each one being truly enhanced by its rhymic pulse. The first of these, ‘Night Mail’ by WH Auden was written, almost composed, to accompany a film he was working on in the 1930’s of the same name. We can feel the rhythm of the train from the beginning, it is already travelling at full steam:

“This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.” As well as describing the passing landscape Auden describes all the types of letter that are being hurried to their destinations and how important to us they are, like:
“The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart’s outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.” What skill in rhythm and rhyming Auden shows us in this delightful piece.
Diana continued with an equally rhythmical poem by Hilaire Belloc, the author we remember from his ‘Cautionary Tales for Children’. In ‘Tarantella’ he paints a picture for us through asking Miranda of whom we know nothing apart from the fact that she must have shared in his experience of watching a Spanish gypsy girl dancing, for he asks her repeatedly
“Do you remember an Inn
Miranda?” As the dancing picks up the pace so Belloc’s verse imitates this:
“And the hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing
Glancing
Dancing
Backing and advancing...” The whole of the first twenty eight verse long stanza is packed with vitality and uplifting rhyme and rhythm whereas the final twelve verse stanza is devoid of optimism. The poetry is now decidedly forelorn. It starts:
“Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.” The rhyme has a falling cadence to suit the absence of humanity. All the jollity and passion of his earlier memories have flown to be replaced by:
“The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground,
No sound:
But the boom
Of the waterfall like doom.” The piece was written in 1923 and it tempts one to conjecture about the loss of  so many lives in the First World War or maybe the movement of the indigenous people from the hills to the towns? Whatever, the reason we are left feeling the loss of something valuable like Belloc and Miranda experienced.

Geoff’s contribution was Philip Larkin’s ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ in which the poet describes his train journey from Hull to London. He recounts how he observed the passing countryside of Lincolnshire and then he came upon “...the next town, new and nondescript” He then started to notice the various leave-takings of the wedding groups as the honeymooners took to the carriages for London. His gift for turning the commonplace and ordinary into poetry, like Auden’s, is fully exploited in this work. He first notices, as the train is leaving the station, the wedding groups:
“We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,” later he comments on seeing it all again at different towns and different stations
“The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads, mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
the nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves and olive-ochres...” Larkin  then describes the gradual moving down to the train’s destination still commenting on what he sees through his window until
“...there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

Marie chose one of our favourite poets, Seamus Heaney. His ‘Night Drive’ started with the strange use of the word ‘ordinariness’ when he said:
“The smells of ordinariness
Were new on the night drive through France;” Juxtaposing that word with “Were new” gives the reader a sense of slight bewilderment especially when we see the word used at the very end of the poem:
“Your ordinariness was renewed there.” How often do we read of a beloved, (probably), being described as ‘ordinary’? Does Heaney mean it as a form of ‘familiarity’ maybe, or is he using it in a heightened way, elevating it to mean that ordinariness is actually something really special; or is he using it ironically? A conundrum indeed. Nevertheless his description of the journey in an open-topped car from the North to the South of France is beautifully described by mentioning the things that he was coming up to, travelling alongside and passing on to the next. We are with him as the “Signposts whitened relentlessly” as his headlights brightened them as he approached, reached and passed “Were promised, promised, came and went” He reassures the person that he “...thought of you continuously” and that at the end of this one thousand mile journey to where:
“Italy laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere
Your ordinariness was renewed there.” leaving us with an intimate but  somewhat puzzling conclusion.

Helen’s delicious home-made cakes and tea and coffee were then indulged by us; thank you so much Helen. We were reminded that the next meeting would be at Suzanne’s where we will be exploring the theme of ‘Meetings’.
That will be on November 5th. at 2.00pm

gw.