On Wednesday the 5th of November we met at Suzanne’s to elaborate on the theme set by her of ‘Meetings’.

We started in the usual manner of reading in turns from ‘The Saga of  Thørkil’ by Jeff Evans. We had left Thørkil having vanquished some Rus enemies and then his captors. Having killed and mutilated Siggeir he had taken his foe’s elaborate Frankish sword and sheath and made his way to the boats to begin his homeward journey. We then learned of the ambush and murder of the elderly, faithful Eirik by Freydan’s henchmen.

Suzanne led our investigations into the subject by saying why she had chosen this particular theme and began with ‘Sunbright’ by Dannie Abse in which he addresses his wife reminding her how he felt dazzled by her being “...so alive with human light” after she had commented on the Venetian atmosphere being “sunbright” and when she first undressed he was so overcome that he “simply had to look away”. In the fourth and last stanza he admits:
“Sweet all this is true or virtually true
Its only a poetry licensed lie
When I rhyme and cheat and wink
And swear I almost need to wear
(muses help me, cross my heart) sunglasses
each time I think of you.”
Suzanne’s second poem was by one of her favourite poets, Wendy Cope and was called ‘After the Lunch’. In it we get the impression that her meeting had gone very well. She and the unknown other had said goodbye as she reached Waterloo Bridge. In a clever understatement she remarks “The weather conditions bring tears to my eyes” and she tries “...not to notice I’ve fallen in love.” She tries to reason with herself through the poem but in the end
“On Waterloo Bridge with the wind in my hair
I am tempted to skip” and
“ The head does its best but the heart is the boss -
I admit it before I am halfway across.”
Her third contribution was Robert Frost’s ‘A time to Talk’ and in this case the meeting is shown to be important to the poet. He knows that there are many more "important’ things to be done in his work-life but
“When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk” he knows that he will drive down into the earth the tool he is using and “... go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.”
Her fourth example was taken from an epitaph in Chelmsford cathedral telling of the relationship  of a couple being “without strife” and the reason being:
“... the wife wore the trousers.”

Marie entertained us first with a Simon Armitage piece of prose called ‘Hop in Dennis’. It had a n almost poetic sound as she read it to us. We imagined the poet’s own voice intoning the story of his taxi-driver’s chat to an unknown passenger about all the famous people called ‘Dennis’ that he had had in his cab. The main story depended upon the reader’s knowledge of the famous footballer Dennis Bergkamp and of his fear of flying. The driver says that he took him all the way to Belgium but that he was late getting to the game there. An element of pure Armitage then takes place when the cabbie describes Bergkamp getting hurriedly dressed into his red and white Arsenal strip in the back of his cab as:
“a contortion of red and white, like Santa Claus in a badger trap.”
Her next piece was one of two Norman McCaig poems called ‘Midnight Encounter’. In it we are invited to imagine a person, maybe the poet himself, on a crystal clear, moonlit night where everything has a surreal feel to it. One of the wayward strands from a wild rose bush appears like a tree and:
“the head of one lolled over the fence,
a fiery bucolic seraph
contemplating the weather
in heavenly turnip fields.” The poet juxtaposes totally conflicting words like “bucolic” and “seraph” and “heavenly” and “turnip” to emphasise the unworldly atmosphere of the scene; the actuality and the metaphorical. The encounter takes place without a word spoken when “What must have been a man” came from a house and snipped off the rose and gave it to the recipient. The encounter is an expression of kindness, of generosity with a mystical, even spiritual, feeling. One is reminded of Blanche duBois’ phrase “The kindness of strangers.” He/she takes it home and is mesmerised by its beauty:
“I look at it and am not blinded
I touch it and am not burned” The speaker concludes the poem in the same ordinary and extraordinary conflation, and here he repeats the phrase, “... what must have been a man” re-entering the house
“with a star by his side, a twinkle
of heavenly secateurs.”
Marie then read her second McCaig piece “Meeting a Goddess” in which he tells us about leaving a house in the city and “maybe” seeing an owl
“like a stub of wood pretending to be
the Goddess of Wisdom.” He goes on to describe how sparrows and blackbirds
“made Scotch noises at it” and to help us understand what he meant by that he says:
“They skirled and screiched and skelloched.” The owl ignored them. The poet spoke to it but he says that even when he hooted to it in its own language it didn’t respond as though it was trying to prove it actually was a log or even the Goddess. When he returned it was no longer there which allowed him to muse that it wasn’t a log but that maybe it was actually the Goddess of Wisdom who had disappeared which, like the attribute itself, was fleeting and ephemeral?

Geoff came up with a reading of what might have been expected to be a very obvious choice, Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’. The poem was never published in his lifetime and some believe that it is incomplete. The poet imagines in a dreamlike manner that he had escaped from the actual war he was experiencing:
“Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which titanic wars had groined.” He comes across piles of sleepers who look either dead or too deep in thought to be disturbed. He was probing them to no effect when one:
“...sprang up, and stared
With pitious recognition in fixed eyes,” and
“... By his dead smile I knew we stood in hell.” The soldier/poet because there is a lack of shell and gun fire Implores him:
“Strange friend", I said, “here is no cause to mourn.” to which he replies that indeed there is so much to mourn and he elucidates in this twenty-nine verse stanza by listing all the hopes he had before he was killed and how being alive was so exciting and full of possibilities and that he had a message for the future. It is that we come across the phrase so well known to all litterati which epitomises Owen’s work. This ghost of a man says how:
“...of my weeping something had been left,
Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
The pity of war, the pity war distilled.” He says that had he lived his truths would have been put to explaining this and cleansing the world through his intellect his and purity. “But not through wounds; not on the cess of war.” The poem ends as it began with a short stanza where the man reveals to Owen that he is the enemy Owen killed and that he only half-heartedly tried to defend himself:
“Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.” One reads and analyses as one reads through a poem as deep,
emotional and intellectual as this but in my case only latterly comes across Owen’s use throughout of his clever half-rhyming technique such as ‘groined’ and ‘groaned’, and as in that last stanza ‘killed’ and ‘cold’. Altogether a profound, if difficult, work of art.   
Geoff’s second piece was by Harriet Monroe and was fittingly called ‘Meeting’. In it she describes the meeting of two opposing forces, one representing the ‘past’ and one the ‘future’ in the forms of an ox-team and an automobile on a long, narrow red road. On the wagon was
“The stubble-bearded man from the mountains
Rustier than his wagon,” and in the automobile “Unmoving eyed the proud chauffeur.” the stubble-bearded man’s daughter was intrigued by
“the smart motor hats of the ladies
And their chiffon scarfs” the proud chauffeur blew his horn to move the ox-team out of the way but it held its ground and eventually the automobile had to reverse along the long red road
“And the stubble-bearded man flipped his rein,
And the ragged little girl looked ahead up the hill
And the ox-team lumbered and limped over the long red road.”

Beti read a poem by DH Lawrence called ‘Snake’ in which he describes his encounter, his meeting at a water trough with a snake. The snake had already arrived when Lawrence approached. The writer was in his pyjamas on this very hot day and feeling vulnerable, no doubt. He was mesmerised by the sight before him as
“He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,” There was a dignified arrogance from the beast and a sense of wonder from its onlooker who witnessed on a very hot day an animal which mirrored the local habitat
“Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.” Knowing that the local black snake wasn’t dangerous and that the gold ones were Lawrence admits to us that he should have taken matters into his own hands and killed it. That was what his ‘education’ was telling him but his admiration for the way in which it came quietly like a guest at his trough
“And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?” overcame the instruction and he found himself liking him. The encounter had the poet asking himself whether he had been a coward insofar as he felt very afraid. He wondered whether he was perverse to wish to converse with him and whether he was too humble as he “felt  so honoured.” He doesn’t answer these questions but goes on to describe the snake’s departure. It was initially as dignified as its arrival but as soon as its back was turned he picked up what he called ‘a clumsy log’ and hurled it at him. He missed and immediately felt what a petty act it had been. It diminished him and he felt guilty and knew that
"“...I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness."
Beti took us from a ‘hot, hot morning’ in Spain to a before-dawn scene in Ted Hughes’ Yorkshire. His poem ‘The Horses’ tells, in couplets, a tale of part of an early morning’s walk. He opens it:
“I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.” (Dylan Thomas? GM Hopkins?), and we are with him when he describes the wintry stillness that we recognise, especially when he uses metaphor as in line four “A world cast in frost” and line six “But the valleys were draining the darkness.” He then sees the horses and we get another superb description when he decribes them as huge and “Megalith-still.” The poem continues in this superb fashion as out of this still greyness his return journey from the ‘kindling tops’ he tells us:
“Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted
Silently, and splitting
to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,” He then comes across the horses for the second time and they are still as satues but “steaming and glistening” now. The descriptive section of the walk ends with the vision of the horses:
“Their hung heads patient as the horizons,” The poem ends with a wish, a hope that sometimes in the future when he is in a busy city among people he will be able to recollect:
“Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.”
Beti’s third piece was Louis McNeice’s ‘Meeting Point’ in which Time was personified and “...was away and somewhere else.” We are encouraged to imagine two lovers at a table in a coffee shop so engrossed in one another that only their existance is real. MacNeice uses eight five-verse stanzas to elucidate this by describing things that were going on around them but in their world nothing moved or sounded. Each stanza repeats the first verse at the end of  it. The rhyming system is a.b.a.b.a which he uses throughout. In verse two, like the Grand old Duke of York, “...they were neither up nor down;” they were suspended in limbo. The stream continued on its way, the stream’s music continued, the bell was silent and he tells us that:
“between the clang and clang a flower
A brazen calyx of no noise” In the  penultimate stanza we appear to have reached the conclusion for all this descriptive reasoning when he says:
“God or whatever means the Good
Be praised that time can stop like this
That what the heart has understood
Can verify in the body’s peace
God or whatever means the Good.” However, MacNeice has a sting in the tail for he adds another stanza beginning: “Time was away and she was here.” At last intimating that he was telling us of his encounter with the unnamed ‘her’ and the reason for the bell stopping and the room glowing was indeed his overwhelming love.
Beti’s finale was a reading from ‘Careless People’ by Sarah Wynne-Williams in which the author describes how she had manoeuvred her boss, Mark Zuckerberg, into an absolutely prime position in order to be able to meet President Putin. She had made all the necessary arrangements and preparations and was feeling very confident that at last the two great men would be talking. Unfortunately for her and her boss Putin’s entourage may have got wind of this and the president of Russia came along the corridor at pace and surrounded by body guards swept past the downcast head of Facebook and Ms Williams.

Diana read part of the prologue from Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ where we learned that narrator had travelled to the Tabard Inn in Southwark where he discovered that a group of twenty-nine other pilgrims were, like him, planning to go to Canterbury. He told us that “I had so spoken with everyone of them” [So hadde I spoken with hem everichon], and “That I was of their fellowship straightway,” [That I was of hir felaweshipe anon]. Chaucer then explains how he intends to write his tale to describe “Of each of them, as it seemed to me [Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,] And who they were, and what rank" [And whiche they weren, and of what degree]. He then starts with his description of the first of the travellers the Knight.
Diana’s second choice describes an unseen ghost-like none-appearance of an invisible apparition! It was Hughes Mearns ‘Atigonish’ [I met a man who wasn’t there]. The first quatrain is repeated at the end of the poem with the first word ‘Yesterday’ being replaced with ‘Last night’ and as well known as it is, it is worth quoting:
“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away...” In the six-verse central stanza the poet even adds an actual sound, (the slamming of a door), after his pleading for the non-existant being not to do it. What a wonderfully surrealist poem in the mode of the later Spike Milligan!
Diana’s third choice was ‘The ruined Maid’ by Thomas Hardy in which we hear a conversation between two women. one who has escaped from a poor, down-trodden life in the country, the other who has not. Although it is never said we get the impression that the thriving one was warned while she was still in a desolate state in the country something akin to: “If you go to the town you will be ruined” When she is asked about all the fine things she wears
“O ‘Melia, my dear, this does everything crown!
Who could have supposed I should meet you in Town?
And whence such fair garments, such prosperi-ty?” she answers:
“O didn’t you know I’d been ruined?” In the last stanza the questioner wishes she
“... had feathers, a fine sweeping gown,
And a delicate face and could strut about town” we know that her answer is going to be:
“My dear - a raw country girl such as you be,
Cannot quite expect that. You ain’t ruined,” said she."

We then got into the serious work of demolishing Suzanne’s lovely cakes along with hot drinks and more cheer.
Our next meeting is at Diana’s house on January 6th. and the subject of our discussions will be “Song Lyrics”

gw