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he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.

Kubla Khan

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail :
And ‘mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And ‘mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !
A Damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ‘twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
S.T. Coleridge, 1816.

Coleridge’s explanation of his inspiration for the poem may clarify some of its more unusual aspects. The opening lines ‘In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree’ immediately immerses the reader in a strange and unfamiliar environment, which the poem then goes on to explore in more detail as it progresses. Images of majestic ‘greenery’ in the poem soon give way to the supernatural, and a chasm ‘Haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover!’, before concluding with a warning to ‘Beware!’ the ‘flashing eyes’ of the demon, and to receive him with holy dread’. The subtitle: ‘A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment’ reminds the reader that the poem is not completed exactly as Coleridge had envisaged: the alleged interference from someone calling at his house left the dream ‘scattered’ within Coleridge’s mind: the remnants of which make up the entirety of Kubla Khan.

Any entries of poetry, stories, lyrics, essays, mini-dramas, plus any other forms of writing will be accepted, as long as they are on the theme of JOURNEYS.

Current Poet Laureate Andrew Motion writes that,

The Sefton Writing Competition is a very welcome event: it celebrates an exciting variety of new voices.

The Judging panel will consist of Brian Wake, Philip Wroe, and David Eddy.

Please click here for more information on terms and conditions, and how to submit your entry. The closing date for entries is 9th October 2009.

The last poem to feature from this anthology is Helen Dunmore’s Ice coming. A poet, novelist, short-story and children’s writer, Helen Dunmore won the Orange Prize for fiction in 1996. She has written abundantly and successfully: in The Raw Garden she questions our notions of what’s really ‘natural’, the impact of human intervention on the landscape and genetic engineering; exploring our relationships with animals and our own animal nature in Bestiary;  in her latest collection, Glad of These Times, her poems “capture the fleetingness of life, its sweetness and intensity, the short time we have on earth and the pleasures of the earth, with death as the frame which sharpens everything and gives it shape.”

Ice coming
(after Doris Lessing)

First, the retreat of the bees
lifting, heavy with the final
pollen of gorse and garden,
lugging the weight of it, like coal sacks
heaped on lorry-backs
in the ice-cream clamour of August.

The retreat of bees, lifting
all at once from city gardens -
suddenly the roses are scentless
as cold probes like a tongue,
crawling through the warm crevices
of Kew and Stepney. The ice comes
slowly, slowly, not to frighten anyone.

Not to frighten anyone. But the Snowdon
valleys are muffled with avalanche,
the Thames freezes, the Promenade des Anglais
clinks with a thousand icicles, where palms
died in a night, and the sea
of Greece stares back like stone
at the ice-Gorgon, white as a sheet.

Ice squeaks and whines. Snow slams
like a door miles off, exploding a forest
to shards and matchsticks. The glacier
is strangest, grey as an elephant,
too big to be heard. Big-foot, Gorgon -
a little mythology
rustles before it is stilled.

So it goes. Ivy, mahonia, viburnum
lift their fossilised flowers
under six feet of ice, for the bees
that are gone. As for being human
it worked once, but for now
and the forseeable future
the conditions are wrong.

Helen Dunmore, 2007

(This poem is reproduced with permission from Earth Shattering (2007, Bloodaxe Books), edited by Neil Astley.)

Frances Horovitz (1938-83) was an English poet, whose perception of the natural world that surrounds her and evocation of human relationships, has led to a remarkable “clarity, precision and attentiveness” in her poetry. This poem considers the amalgamation of spirits of the human and natural world, almost Buddhist or Taoist in its message. Living in the Cotswolds, Cumbria and the Welsh Marches, many of her poems were inspired by remote landscapes, which are revealed through “perfect rhythym and great delicacy”.

Rain – Birdoswald

I stand under a leafless tree
more still, in this mouse-pattering
thrum of rain,
thean cattle shifting in the field.
It is more dark than light.
A Chinese painter’s brush of deepening grey
moves in a subtle tide.

The beasts are darker islands now.
Wet-stained and silvered by the rain
they suffer night,
marooned as still as stone or tree.
We sense each other’s quiet.

Almost, death could come
inevitable, unstrange
as is this dusk and rain,
and I should be no more
myself, than raindrops
glimmering in last light
on black ash buds

or night beasts in a winter field.

Frances Horovitz, 1980

(This poem is reproduced with permission from Earth Shattering (2007, Bloodaxe Books), edited by Neil Astley.)

Snake appeared in Lawrence’s 1923 collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers, which included some of his preeminent reflections on the “flux of life and the ‘otherness’ of the non-human world” and as this poem identifies, the downfalls of an ‘accursed human education’. These poems are an affirmation of the grandeur and the mystery of nature, of which the snake in this poem typifies: the snake is an ordinary (albeit probably poisonous) reptile, ‘yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied’, but at the same time it possess a mythical, godlike quality, one of the ‘lords’ of the ‘underworld’ embodying all the dark inexplicable forces of nature that are feared and neglected by humans.

Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark
carob tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was
at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in
the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied
down, over the edge of the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a
small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack
long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

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,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning
bowels of the earth
On the day of the Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my eduation said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the
gold are venemous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish
him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to
drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?
Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?
Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,
But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From our the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air,
so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, intothe air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw down his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,
and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing
into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly
drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind
convulsed in undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the
wall-front.
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human
education.

And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in excile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I misssed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate;
A pettiness.

D. H. Lawrence, 1923

(featured in Earth Shattering (2007, Bloodaxe Books), edited by Neil Astley.)

With a profound sensitivity for nature and words, W. S. Merwin has produced some of the most influential American poetry of the last fifty years. He is an environmentalist, pacifist and intensely anti-imperialist, which, combined with his intimate feeling for landscape and language has enabled him to create poetry where the natural subject interflows with the words and style of the poem. In an interview with Daniel Bourne, W. S. Merwin says:

The natural world is inseperable from us, and our attitude toward it, our use of it, is political action. If you pick up any part of it you pick up the whole thing. Sometimes I feel more immediately concerned with what’s happening to the elements, the sea, the animals, the language, than I do with any particular society. I don’t make a distinction in terms of importance. The poisoning of the soil, the imminence of nuclear disaster, are the same thing. You shut your eyes and you open them and you’re staring at the same thing though the form of it may look different.

The Shore

How can anyone know that a whale
two hundred years ago could hear another
whale at the opposite end of the earth
or tell how long the eyes
of a whale have faced both halves of the world
and have found light far down in old company

with the sounds of hollow iron charging
clanging through the oceans and with the circuitries
and the harpoons of the humans
and the poisoning of the seas
a whale can hear no farther through the present
than a jet can fly in a few minutes

in days of their hearing the great Blues gathered like clouds
the sunlight under the sea’s surfaces sank
into their backs as into the water around them
through which they flew invisible from above
except as flashes of movement
and they could hear each other’s voices wherever they went

once it is on its own a Blue can wander
the whole world beholding both sides of the water
raising in each ocean the songs of the Blues
that it learned from distances it can no longer hear
it can fly all its life without ever meeting another Blue
this is what we are doing this is the way we sing oh Blue Blue

W. S. Merwin

(This poem is reproduced with permission from Earth Shattering (2007, Bloodaxe Books), edited by Neil Astley.)

Realising that the natural world around us is in peril, it is time once more that we paid attention to the decline of our natural surroundings. The problem is, of course, for most of us (and this is both a feeble excuse and indicative of modern living) that it takes a fair amount of time to get to vast expanses of rural landscape but if we look close enough around us, there are beautiful elements of nature that man has not yet been able to destroy. Henry Thoreau explains:

The phenomena of the year take place every day in a pond on a small scale. Every morning, generally speaking, the shallow water is being warmed more rapidly than the deep, though it may not be made so warm after all, and every evening it is being cooled more rapidly until the morning. The day is an epitome of the year. (from Walden)

Nature, in all its multiple forms, was of paramount importance to Wordsworth but he would rarely use simple descriptions in his poetry. Instead, his poems are concerned with his position within the natural world, his response and reaction to it, using poetry both “to look at the relationship between nature and human life and to explore the belief that nature can have an impact on our emotional and spiritual lives.

from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration: – feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligble world,
Is lightened: – that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affectations gently lead us on, -
Until the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
If this
Be but vain belief, yet, oh! how oft -
In darkness amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart -
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The pictureof the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years.

William Wordsworth

July 13, 1798

(featured in Earth Shattering (2007, Bloodaxe Books), edited by Neil Astley.)

Towards the end of last year, Bloodaxe published an anthology of poems called Earth Shattering, a collection of work tackling not only the evident contemporary issues such as global warming, extinction of species and the felling of rainforests but also a retrospective look at ecological poems: from the wilderness poetry of ancient China to postcolonial and feminist perspectives, all addressing environmental destruction and ecological balance. The collection features a wide-variety of poets, from Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and Hardy to Plath, Levertov, Constantine and Zephaniah. It is a diverse collection, exposing the ways in which the very structure of our living earth is being torn apart and the detrimental position of a modern world that is increasingly cutting itself off from nature.

Each day next week we will bring you one poem from the collection, showing that although poems may be small and seemingly inconsequential, their power and force will have an effect on every reader. If your resolve is stirred, you’re adding your voice to a collective call for change – and that’s a good way to start the year.

If you want to receive email notifications when the poems appear (and whenever we feature a poem in future) sign up here. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose.

Posted by Jen Tomkins

Forget Philip Roth, Claudio Magris and Milan Kundera, all of whom have been tipped often. Forget, too, that obscure Szechuan storyteller with the unpronounceable name published by Serpent’s Tail or the Hayseed Press. Here is a great contemporary woman novelist and London intellectual who has dedicated her long life and impressive body of work to the tireless and unflinching exploration of man’s (and woman’s) place in the world, together with issues of race, gender and social justice. This prize finally acknowledges what has been true for at least 40 years: that she is one of the most important literary voices of her generation.

The feature in the Observer includes commentary on Lessing by several writers and fans, including our very own Jane Davis.

Tom Sperlinger, whose 2005 interview with Lessing appeared in The Reader magazine and which you can read here, sent me this piece in response to the news:

In a recent introduction to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Doris Lessing recalls once giving a lift to a young solider ‘in an unusual state of mind’. He ‘could not stop talking’, she writes, ‘he was in love’. During the journey, he pulled out a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and said that ‘he had never read anything like it, well, he wasn’t really a reader, actually this was the only book he had ever read. But he had read it several times, and kept finding new things in it.’

‘Surely,’ Lessing writes, ‘this youth, who was soon going to be married, was Lawrence’s ideal reader’.

Who is the ideal reader of one of Lessing’s novels? Maybe a teenager, or young man or woman; someone in an unusual state of mind, perhaps in love. She certainly appeals to some who do not otherwise think of themselves as readers.

Who does read Lessing?

This question has occurred to me frequently over the past few years, because there is no other author whom I have recommended with such mixed results. I am only just back on speaking terms with the members of my mother’s book group, all of whom hated Love, Again.

In other cases her books have been a revelation or a surprise. I gave Mara and Dann, an adventure story set after another ice age, to a friend, R, who teaches literature at a university. Though he received the gift politely, he couldn’t disguise his skepticism. A few weeks later he sent me a text saying ‘Mara seems more prescient every day’. This was the summer of 2005, around the time of the floods in New Orleans. ‘Don’t tell me how it ends,’ he pleaded.

I lent The Good Terrorist to my housemate J, a beautifully undisciplined reader, who never keeps a book after he has finished it. He said it was the best book he had read in years, and talked unguardedly about his own memories of living in a squat and getting in trouble with the police. Two other housemates, A and A, all-but fought over who would be the first to read On Cats. The winner carried it about with her for days and, soon after, bought a kitten. We considered naming him after Lessing’s El Magnifico and still think of him as our Lessing cat.

I plucked up the courage to teach Lessing last year, on an MA course on women’s writing. To my surprise, almost all of the students loved The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. ‘Does it remind you of anything else you’ve read?’ I asked them, towards the end of the seminar. One said: ‘I’ve never read anything like this.’

It’s a wonderful thought that after yesterday’s announcement many new readers will find Lessing’s works for the first time.

Posted by Chris Routledge. Powered by Qumana