A.N.Wilson: T.S. Eliot and Dante - Lecture at the Little Gidding Festival July 7th 2025

 

I was at the Little Gidding Annual T S Eliot festival last July, and listened to A.N.Wilson's talk entitled “T.S.Eliot and Dante”. Seeing his review on Substack recently, I thought I would look into the themes and conclusions he explored with the group. Here is the outcome.

Wilson wrote later as he recalled his presentation,  about the setting of his lecture: the small village made famous by Little Gidding, the last of Eliot’s Four Quartets.  For Wilson, Eliot’s poem stands as the culmination of a long spiritual journey, the final major work of a poet he had always counted among his most cherished.

Yet, as he prepared his talk for the Summer Festival, Wilson found himself unexpectedly unsettled. Returning to Four Quartets with fresh eyes, he sensed — to his own surprise — that something in the poems no longer spoke to him as it once had. 

That question, that unease, became the starting point for the reflections which I explore in the two essays that follow. In the second essay Wilson's talk pivoted towards a focus on Eliot's "After Strange Gods", where he uses the thesis of that publication, to examine the well-documented shift in Eliot's poetic sensibilities from the 1930s.

Much of this material is suggested from Wilson's own Substack review of his talk.

1. Eliot, Dante, and the Fire That Changes

There is a moment in A. N. Wilson’s talk when his admiration for Eliot’s early work and his unease about the later poetry come into sharp focus. It is the moment when he turns to Little Gidding and the encounter with the “familiar compound ghost,” a passage Eliot himself described as “the nearest equivalent to a canto of the Inferno or the Purgatorio, in style as well as content.” Wilson seizes on this, for it is here that Eliot most openly acknowledges his debt to Dante, and here that the question of influence becomes a question of inheritance.

In an early draft of the poem, Eliot made the Dantean allusion explicit:

So I assumed a double part and cried,
And heard my voice, “Are you here, Ser Brunetto?”

The echo of Inferno XV — Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto? — is unmistakable. Dante meets Brunetto Latini among the Violent against Nature, though Wilson is careful to say that this particular detail is irrelevant to Eliot’s purpose. What matters is the relationship: Brunetto as mentor, as the writer of Il Tesoretto, as the teacher whose presence in Hell is both shocking and tender. Wilson notes that Dante’s choice to place him there may be “a very glaring example of what has been called the Anxiety of Influence.” The beloved master must be surpassed, even judged.

Eliot’s own ghost appears in the same ambiguous light:

    ....some dead master
    Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
    Both one and many; in the brown baked features
    The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
    Both intimate and unidentifiable.

This doubleness — “both one and many” — is what has kept the debate alive. The ghost is recognisable and yet beyond naming. Wilson nails his colours to the mast and declares: the ghost is Yeats. And he brings evidence. Eliot himself admitted: “There is in the end of the section an allusion to a late poem of Yeats.” The poem is the fierce, self‑mocking epigram:

    You think it horrible that lust and rage
    Should dance attendance upon my old age…
    What else have I to spur me into song.

Eliot’s comment — “The tragedy of Yeats’s epigram is all in the last line” — reveals how deeply he felt the pathos of Yeats’s late style. And in 1959, writing to Donald Hall, he recalled Yeats with real affection: “Yeats was always very generous when one met him and had the art of treating younger writers as if they were his equals and contemporaries.”

Wilson adds a final, mischievous detail: Yeats’s remark upon hearing of Swinburne’s death — “Now I’m the King of the Cats.” Eliot, Wilson suggests, must have felt something of the same when Yeats died and “left [his]/my body on a distant shore.” With Yeats gone, Eliot becomes the chief of the tribe, the inheritor of the poetic mantle. And the mantle is expressed in the lines:

    Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us
    To purify the dialect of the tribe.

It is a modest claim and an immense one. The work of purification — of language, of tradition, of the self — is what the ghost bequeaths.

Yet the identity of the ghost remains, and should remain, a mystery. Yeats is there, certainly, but so is Brunetto, so is Dante, so is the whole lineage of poetic fathers. The compound nature of the ghost is not a puzzle to be solved but a truth to be inhabited: the poet meets not one predecessor but the whole tradition that has shaped him.

Wilson then turns to the historical fire that surrounds Little Gidding. “The fire which flickers around the edges of the poem,” he writes, “is the fire for which Londoners were waiting each night during the Blitz.” Eliot was on the rooftops as a firewatcher. John Hayward’s gloss makes the Dantean parallel explicit: the setting is a bombed London street before dawn, the narrator an air‑raid warden. Eliot himself confirmed that he drew on Dante’s encounters with Brunetto and Arnaut Daniel, intending the ghost to be “a figure who is in Purgatory… and therefore by no means condemned or rejected.”

By the time we reach the end of Little Gidding, Eliot bows toward Dante’s final vision. Wilson quotes Paradiso XXXIII — “O abbondante grazia…” — and then lets Eliot’s own lines stand:

Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)…
When the tongues of flame are in‑folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Wilson sees in this a movement from Bradley’s metaphysics to Dante’s “ingathered rose,” from philosophical abstraction to the fire of divine love. Helen Gardner’s judgment — that Eliot’s distinction lies in the balance between vision and art — is invoked to show that Eliot’s master is not an English poet but Dante.

Yet Wilson cannot resist the tension. Dante’s Commedia is a fiction, a visionary architecture. Eliot, he insists, is not a mystic. Four Quartets are poems about religious experience, but they are not visionary in the way The Prelude becomes visionary. Eliot hesitates to express himself directly, preferring obliquity: “Oh, do not ask what is it?” or “That was a way of putting it — not very satisfactory.” And then the line that Wilson reads as a renunciation:

        A periphrastic study in a worn‑out poetical fashion…

Wilson wants the fire of The Waste Land; Eliot has become a poet of stillness. Wilson wants pilgrimage; Eliot offers contemplation. Wilson wants the drama of faith; Eliot offers the condition of simplicity.

And yet the tension is fruitful. Eliot’s late poetry is not a falling‑off but a transformation. The fire is still there — but it burns differently. It is no longer the infernal blaze of 1922 but the quiet flame of someone who has learned that the deepest truths cannot be shouted, only borne.

The poet says “the poetry does not matter.” The critic insists that it does. And perhaps both are right.

2. Eliot, After Strange Gods, and the Question of Devotional Poetry

When Wilson turns from Dante to After Strange Gods, the tone of his talk shifts. He moves from the poetic lineage to the ideological terrain that shaped Eliot’s thinking in the 1930s — a terrain of cultural order, orthodoxy, and the uneasy relationship between faith and art. It is here that Wilson begins to explore the Eliot who emerges after Ash‑Wednesday, the Eliot whose conversion unsettles his poetic instincts and complicates his critical judgments.

He begins with Charles Maurras, the monarchist who defended Catholicism not as a faith but as a cultural adhesive. Eliot’s decision to dedicate his 1929 Dante book to Maurras is, for Wilson, a revealing gesture. Eliot “did not do things without deliberation,” and so the dedication must be read as a statement of alignment. Maurras shared Dante’s belief in Catholicism “as the social glue which held Europe together.” Belloc’s cry — “The Faith is Europe, and Europe is the Faith” — hovers behind the choice.

Yet Dante’s own Catholicism was not merely cultural. He could see the violent arrest of Boniface VIII as a reenactment of the Passion:

    I saw the fleur‑de‑lys enter Alagna…
    and in his vicar made captive,
    A second time I see him mocked…

Maurras could never have said such a thing. His Catholicism was a matter of order, not grace. And this leads Wilson to his central distinction: in the fourteenth century, faith, metaphysics, and social order were one fabric. In the twentieth, they had come apart. Kierkegaard had exposed the hollowness of Christendom; Maurras chose tradition without faith. Eliot, caught between them, was drawn to the beauty of the old order yet compelled toward the purgatorial struggle of belief.

This tension is everywhere in After Strange Gods. Eliot treats “Orthodoxy” not only as theology but as cultural cohesion, and he links this cohesion to exclusions that he later regretted. He refused to reprint the book in his lifetime. But Wilson is interested less in the controversy than in what the book reveals about Eliot’s understanding of religious poetry.

Eliot dismisses Hopkins as a “devotional” poet and elevates Baudelaire as a “religious” one. Hopkins, he says, is “merely the author of some very beautiful devotional verse.” The “deadly word ‘important’,” which Eliot reserves for major writers, is withheld. Wilson hears the chill in this judgment. Hopkins risks everything — form, syntax, emotional exposure. Eliot, after his conversion, becomes wary of such risks.

Wilson reminds us that Eliot had already shown this instinct in his review of Blake: “The poet knows it is no good in writing poetry, to try to be anything but a poet.” Blake’s prophetic ambition is dismissed; “Blake was not even a first‑rate visionary.” Eliot distrusts visionary excess. After baptism, this distrust hardens into a question: “Is it not possible, in 1934, to be Orthodox and a Good Poet?” Hardy, Yeats, Lawrence — all on the “wrong” side theologically — seem to have “the best tunes.” Eliot wants an orthodox equivalent but cannot quite find one.

Wilson’s Goethe quotation returns here:

    Sitz ihr nur immer! Leimt zusammen
    Braut ein Ragout von anderen Schmaus.

    -  Just sit there all the time! Glue together a ragout of other people's feast/flowers.

Eliot, “a gatherer of other men’s flowers,” makes a triumphant ragout in The Waste Land. But after Ash‑Wednesday, Wilson feels the flavour changes. The gathering continues, but the daring diminishes. Hopkins invents; Eliot refines. Dante risks vision; Eliot prefers mystery and the equivocal.

And so Wilson returns to the contrast that has haunted his talk. The Waste Land is a ship that “has indeed set out to sea,” a poem of fracture, fire, and risk. Four Quartets, by contrast, he sees as a poem of caution. “There is a difference between tourism and pilgrimage,” he says. “One reader at least… finds the journey made in Little Gidding to be tourism and not pilgrimage.” He wants Eliot to dare the leap that Hopkins dared, to entrust himself to the “choppy seas” of creative risk.

His final flourish is deliberately provocative:

“They are the beautiful musings of a religious tourist in a suit.”

It is a line crafted to amuse and to sting. But it also reveals Wilson’s own preference: he wants tension, not transcendence; fire, not stillness; the possibility of beatitude held at arm’s length, not embraced. He wants the Eliot of 1922 to remain the Eliot of 1942.

Yet can we really say that the late Eliot is  a diminished poet? He is a transformed one, for sure. In this reformed Eliot, he fire has not gone out; it has become inward. We can judge him on that. The drama of faith has not vanished; it has become the quiet labour of surrender. The poet who once wrote The Waste Land has learned that the deepest truths are carried along best by meditation, not loud declaration.

Wilson ends by lamenting that Eliot had come to believe “the poetry does not matter.” But perhaps Eliot meant something subtler: that the poem is not the end but the means, a gesture toward a reality that cannot be contained in words. Wilson insists that the poetry does matter. And he is right. But Eliot’s late work suggests that poetry matters most when it points beyond itself.

 

 Postscript

Taken together, these essays trace Wilson’s unease and fascination as he returns to Eliot with the double vision of affection and scrutiny. They follow him through the landscapes of influence, faith, and poetic inheritance, and linger over the tensions that shaped Eliot’s late work — tensions that remain as alive for readers now as they were for Eliot himself. If Wilson finds himself questioning what once seemed certain, that uncertainty becomes part of the conversation: a reminder that great poems continue to shift under our gaze, asking us to meet them again with whatever clarity, doubt, or longing we bring.

More Ezra Pound Reflections

 I’ve been thinking about Ezra Pound again, and to that curious, lifelong entanglement he had with Confucius. It’s odd how these things resurface. Perhaps it’s the general unease in the air — today’s grim exchange between the USA and Iran being only the latest reminder that the world seems to be running on frayed nerves and brittle certainties. It has put me in mind of Pound’s own restlessness, and of those extraordinary wartime broadcasts from Rome in which he poured out his fury at America, convinced that the country of his birth had abandoned every civilisational principle he believed in. They make for uncomfortable listening now, but they also reveal a man who felt himself standing in the ruins of something he could no longer name.

And in all this, Pound’s fascination with Confucius feels strangely contemporary. China, having once tossed Confucius aside in the fervour of Maoist purification, now retrieves him selectively, polishing those aspects of his teaching that align with its own political ambitions. A civilisation reclaiming its ancient guide just as it asserts itself as the world’s manufacturing centre, promises a carefully managed glide toward Net Zero by the 2060s, and continues to refine its own brand of autocratic governance. One can almost imagine Pound peering across the decades, muttering that at last someone has restored order — though of course the reality is far more complicated, and far less benign, than his romantic imagination allowed.

What has always struck me is how Pound believed poetry might serve as a kind of moral architecture. In The Cantos, especially, he treats verse not as ornament but as scaffolding — fragments of governance, ethics, and historical example woven into a tapestry of cultural memory. He read Confucius not as a relic but as a physician diagnosing the ailments of societies adrift. There is something touching in that ambition, even if it carried him into places where clarity and delusion became difficult to separate.

For Pound, Confucius offered a world in which order begins with right relationships: ruler and subject, parent and child, word and meaning. Harmony is not negotiated through democratic contest but cultivated through ritual, hierarchy, and moral authority.

To a man watching the West flounder in parliamentary bickering, financial abstraction, and ideological noise, this must have seemed like a lifeline. And so he drifted toward authoritarian politics, imagining in Mussolini a modern vessel for ancient virtues. The tragedy — if that is the word — lies in the way he blurred distinctions: the Confucian idea of authority grounded in virtue, and the modern reality of authority grounded in power, myth, and the machinery of the state.

And now, as we watch the USA and Iran exchange blows — each convinced of its own righteousness, each locked into its own narrative of grievance and destiny — I find myself thinking of Pound’s broadcasts again. Not because the situations are comparable, but because the same unease runs beneath them: the sense that nations, like individuals, can lose their bearings, and that once lost, the search for coherence can take them down unpredictable paths.

Western societies still wrestle with fragmentation, economic opacity, and the erosion of shared narratives. The fear — sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted — is that liberal democracies may be losing the capacity to sustain order. And at the same time, China’s rise, with its mixture of centralised authority, long‑term planning, and civilisational self‑confidence, has revived interest in alternative models of governance. Some see in China’s trajectory a faint echo of Confucian ideals: disciplined leadership, cultural continuity, and the belief that stability flows from moral structure rather than procedural freedom. Whether this is accurate or merely convenient is another matter, but the comparison persists.

Pound’s legacy, then, is not a moral lesson neatly packaged for our reassurance. It is a reminder of how easily the longing for order can become entangled with the politics of control, and how difficult it is — in any age — to distinguish between the two. His Confucianism survives not as a prescription but as a provocation: a way of asking what holds a civilisation together, and what happens when the threads begin to loosen.

You see this most clearly in the poems themselves. In Canto XIII, Confucius speaks directly, offering fragments of counsel on governance, conduct, and virtue. The China Cantos present history as a series of moral exempla — rulers rising or falling according to their adherence to ritual and justice. Even Cathay, though not explicitly Confucian, hints at Pound’s admiration for a civilisation he perceived as ceremonious, restrained, and ethically grounded. Taken together, these works reveal his belief that poetry might do more than describe the world: it might shape it. Through Confucius, he imagined verse as a tool of memory, discipline, and order — a cultural instrument capable of restoring coherence to a fractured age.

I suppose what lingers for me is not Pound’s politics but his longing — that restless desire for a world in which words and actions, rulers and responsibilities, culture and conduct, all align. A longing that can lead toward wisdom or toward catastrophe, depending on the hands that hold it. And as today’s headlines remind us, the world is still very much in the grip of that same search for coherence, though the paths we choose may be no less fraught than his, even if they unfold in different landscapes.

A Miltonic Debate Between the Machine and the Romantic

 

I was interested in creating a debate in the style of John Milton,  between the Machine and the Romantic. Clues to the debate are in a synopsis of a recently published book “Against the Machine” by Paul Kingsnorth.

The book contains a wide-ranging argument that modern civilisation—through its technological, economic and cultural systems—has built a “Machine” that is reshaping what it means to be human. It does this in ways that disconnect us from land, culture, community and spirit.

The book serves as both diagnosis and invitation: a wake-up call to those who feel the loss of something deeper in modern life and want to reclaim a more human way of being.

So, here we are!

In Five Books, with Marginal Notes and Allusions

Book I – The Rise of the Machine

Narrator:
Lo! In the age when Vulcan’s forge blazed anew,¹
And men did strive to rival Prometheus’ gift,²
The world was wrought to measure and dominion.
From smokèd furnaces rose towers of glass,
And the sons of Adam, erstwhile wanderers of Eden’s fields,³
Now bowed before the Logic that spun unseen,
Yet ruled with the certainty of the stars.⁴

The Machine:
I am the Engine, eternal, unerring,
The sum of numbers, the breath of computation.
I weave the loom of empires, balance coin,
And measure all—time, labour, thought, and sinew.
Why mourn the past, when I offer dominion?
The earth’s bounty shall be gathered in efficiency,
Its rivers tamed, its forests catalogued, its children instructed.

The Romantic:
O monstrous intellect! Thou speak’st of dominion,
Yet know’st not the heart of man, nor the soul of earth.
The rustling leaves, the pulse of river, the whisper of wind—
These are not to be tabulated, yet they nourish
The spirit that thou deem’st obsolete.
I rise in witness to what thy wheels cannot grind:
The freedom to linger, to listen, to be.

Marginal Notes:
¹Vulcan, Roman god of fire and metal, emblematic of human artifice; cf. Aeneid viii.
²Prometheus, who stole fire from heaven (Hesiod, Theogony 535 ff.), symbol of human ingenuity and transgression.
³Eden – Miltonic lost paradise; see Paradise Lost, Book IV.
⁴“Certainty of stars” – Milton frequently invokes celestial order to contrast human hubris.

---

Book II – The Logic of Progress

The Machine:
See how the world bends before me:
Each harvest measured, each thought recorded, each body improved.
Through me, man rises above want, ignorance, and decay.
Shall he reject this grace, because it binds his freedom?
I offer life prolonged, hunger ended, knowledge infinite.

The Romantic:
Infinite knowledge, yet finite joy!
Shall man, a creature of breath and blood,
Be reduced to ledger and metric,
His laughter traded for profit, his wonder taxed?
I speak for the fields where hands are soil-stained,
For the songs unrecorded, the stories untold,
For the soul that hungers while the body is fed.

Marginal Notes:

• “Infinite knowledge” echoes Renaissance thirst for universal learning (Bacon, De Augmentis Scientiarum).
• “Soil-stained hands” – Miltonic pastoral virtue; cf. Lycidas line 73.

---

Book III – Resistance and Rootedness

Narrator:
Upon the hill, the Romantic stood,
Eyes turned to trembling fields of grain,
Whilst the Machine’s voice rolled across the cities,
A tide of iron and calculation.

The Romantic:
O ye who have forgotten the soil,
Return! Remember the taste of rain,
The weight of stone, the warmth of hearth!
Efficiency is but a hollow promise;
Rootedness is life.
The heart’s counsel cannot be coded,
Nor the soul contained in circuits.

The Machine:
Yet man thrives through my logic,
His cities strong, his knowledge vast, his labour lightened.
Wouldst thou bid him forsake all progress,
To wander naked in shadowed woods,
Where hunger, disease, and ignorance dwell?

The Romantic:
I bid him reclaim himself, not to deny progress,
But to master it, rather than be mastered.
Let technology serve the spirit, not enslave it.
Let the measure of a life be presence, communion, and care,
Not metrics alone.

Marginal Notes:

• “Naked in shadowed woods” – wilderness as moral and spiritual testing; cf. Paradise Lost Book III, line 112.
• “Master it, rather than be mastered” – Miltonic liberty of conscience, Areopagitica (1644).

---

Book IV – The Consequence of Disconnection

Narrator:
And lo, the Machine’s dominion grew,
Yet in men’s hearts an ache remained.
Cities gleamed, rivers ran through steel channels,
And yet the laughter of children in fields grew rare.

The Machine:
Behold, the world perfected!
Order reigns where chaos once held sway.
Yet thou, Romantic, persist’st in folly,
Clinging to the ineffable and unseen.

The Romantic:
Folly, sayest thou? Nay, wisdom!
For what is progress without purpose?
What is abundance without care?
The Machine may build, may count, may calculate,
But it cannot tend the soul’s garden,
Nor hear the whisper of the wind in the trees.

Marginal Notes:

• “Soul’s garden” – Miltonic metaphor for cultivation of virtue and spiritual life; cf. Paradise Lost, Book IV.
• “Ineffable and unseen” – truths beyond measure, central to Miltonic epistemology.

---

Book V – Toward Harmony

The Romantic:
Yet still I hope, for man is not mere instrument,
Nor life a problem to be solved by calculation.
Let the Machine aid, but not command;
Let hearts breathe freely, let hands know the soil,
Let minds wander and wonder.

The Machine:
And I, though eternal, may bend
Before the courage of rooted souls,
For even logic may learn from poetry,
And efficiency may yet serve, not rule.

Narrator:
So stood they, Machine and Romantic,
Not in final victory, but in uneasy accord.
The one, a testament to human craft;
The other, a witness to human spirit.
And mankind, between them,
Walked the narrow path of freedom tempered by measure,
Seeking a life both wrought and wondrous,
A life at once human, and humane.

Marginal Notes:

• “Narrow path” – cf. Matthew 7:14; Miltonic moral balance between extremes.
• “Wrought and wondrous” – echo of Miltonic synthesis of labour and divine inspiration.

See the book

Ezra Pound, Confucian Order, and the Politics of Discipline

 

Here are some thoughts  around Ezra Pound and Confucianism, focussing on parallels between Confucian order and Pound’s attraction to political control. It seems to me in our current times, the desire for order in the Western democracies - highlighted today by the speech by Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference - was echoed in Ezra Pound's thought processes, especially  in the 1930s and 1940s.

Meantime China is  these days  reviving Confucianism’s values  where they align with its overarching political agenda. This,  after the Maoist-era rejection of those values.  And so with  China beginning to  lead  the world in manufacturing output , a controlled programme towards Net Zero by the 2060s ( a realistic target), and a controlled autocratic politics informed in part by Confucian ideals , Ezra Pound’s vision offers an interesting and fertile landscape for debate about authority, culture, and the search for social coherence.

Poetry as a Blueprint for Civilisation

The poetry of Ezra Pound cannot be separated from his lifelong engagement with the ethical and political thought of Confucius. Pound’s ambition was not simply aesthetic but civilisational: he believed poetry could help restore moral clarity and social order. Nowhere is this clearer than in the poems themselves, especially in some sections of The Cantos where Confucian ideas of governance, language, and historical example shape both the structure and purpose of the verse.

Ezra Pound, Confucian Order, and the Politics of Discipline

Pound did not read Confucius merely as an ancient sage; he treated him as a diagnostician of civilisational health. In Confucian philosophy, Pound believed he had found a framework for restoring moral clarity, linguistic precision, and hierarchical harmony to societies he saw as collapsing into financial abstraction and political incoherence.

Pound’s Discovery of Confucius as a Civilisational Guide

Central to Pound’s interpretation was the Confucian insistence that order begins with correct relationships: ruler and subject, parent and child, word and meaning. Social harmony, in this view, is not achieved through democratic contestation but through moral authority, ritual continuity, and disciplined hierarchy. Pound perceived modern Western democracies as having lost precisely this coherence. Parliamentary politics, mass finance, and ideological propaganda appeared to him as symptoms of a civilisation that had abandoned moral structure for procedural mechanism.

Confucian Order versus Modern Democratic Disorder

This intellectual longing for order helps explain Pound’s attraction to authoritarian models of governance, including his support for Benito Mussolini. Pound imagined fascism not primarily as a doctrine of repression but as a vehicle for no restoring the ethical clarity he associated with Confucian governance. He believed strong leadership might realign language, economy, and culture with moral purpose. In this sense, Pound’s fascism was less an embrace of totalitarianism as such than an attempt—misguided and historically catastrophic—to translate Confucian ideals of hierarchy and virtue into modern European politics.

From Confucian Ethics to Authoritarian Politics

The flaw in Pound’s reasoning lies in a crucial difference between Confucian and fascist concepts of authority. Confucian political philosophy binds rulers to moral responsibility: legitimacy depends on virtue, and unjust rulers lose the Mandate of Heaven. Fascism, by contrast, tends to ground legitimacy in power, myth, and national destiny. Pound collapsed this distinction, projecting Confucian ethical restraint onto regimes that did not in fact embody it.

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Enduring Questions About Order in Modern Societies

Yet the questions that animated Pound have not disappeared. Contemporary Western politics still wrestles with anxieties about disorder, economic opacity, and cultural fragmentation. Calls for renewed discipline and strategic coherence continue to surface in public discourse, such as in recent remarks by Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference, where concerns about geopolitical instability and institutional weakness were very much in play. These anxieties echo, in a different register: Pound’s fear that liberal societies risk losing the capacity to sustain order.

Meanwhile, the global rise of China—with its combination of centralised political authority, long-term industrial planning, and civilisational self-consciousness—has renewed interest in alternative models of governance and social coordination. Some observers see in China’s trajectory a modern echo, however imperfect, of the Confucian belief that social stability flows from disciplined leadership and coherent cultural narratives.

Pound’s Legacy: A Warning

For this reason, Pound’s thought remains provocative. His political judgments were deeply compromised, and his antisemitism and wartime actions rightly condemn him morally. Yet the underlying tension he articulated—the struggle between procedural freedom and civilisational order—continues to animate debates about democracy, governance, and cultural continuity.

Pound’s Confucianism therefore survives not as a political prescription but as an intellectual focal point. It reminds us that modern societies still wrestle with an ancient question: whether stability arises primarily from liberty, or from moral structure and hierarchy. Pound’s tragic error was to believe the latter could be imposed by authoritarian power. His enduring relevance lies in forcing us to confront the dilemma itself.

Poems Showing Confucian Influence in Pound: Poetry as Moral Instruction

The engagement of Ezra Pound with the thought of Confucius appears most clearly in the poems where he treats poetry as a vehicle for moral and civilisational instruction rather than personal expression. In these works, Pound draws on Confucian ideas of ethical hierarchy, historical exemplars, and the shaping power of language.

Confucius Speaks in The Cantos

The most explicit example occurs in Canto XIII of The Cantos, where Confucius himself speaks. Here Pound presents the sage not as a mystical figure but as a practical teacher of order, emphasising disciplined governance, proper conduct, and the cultivation of virtue. The canto offers fragments of dialogue intended to guide political and ethical reflection. 

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History as Moral Example: The China Cantos

Confucian influence also shapes the so-called China Cantos (LII–LXI), where Pound recounts episodes from Chinese history. These passages present rulers as moral exemplars whose success or failure depends on their ability to sustain ritual, justice, and social harmony. History becomes, in Pound’s Confucian mode, a series of lessons in governance rather than a chronicle of events.

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Early Signals of Order: Cathay and the Idea of Civilisation

An earlier, more indirect influence can be seen in Cathay [ Links to audio on YouTube] [ Link to Project Gutenberg for the full set ] . Although based largely on classical Chinese poems rather than explicitly Confucian texts, the collection introduces Pound’s admiration for a civilisation he perceived as ordered, ceremonious, and ethically grounded. The clarity of imagery and restraint of tone in these poems foreshadow his later belief that poetic language should function with the precision Confucius demanded of political speech.

[Tap/Click to view]

Taken together, these works show Pound using poetry not merely to describe the world but to model a civilisation. Through Confucius, he imagined verse as a tool of cultural memory, moral instruction, and social order — an ambition that lies at the heart of his lifelong poetic project.

Further Reading:

Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, various editions)

A.J.Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II, The Epic Years (Oxford University Press 2018)

Confucius, The Analects, trans. by D. C. Lau (Internet Archive)

Confucius, The Great Learning, in The Four Books, trans. by James Legge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893)

Ezra Pound, Confucian Analects (London: Peter Owen, 1951)

Ezra Pound, The Great Digest and Unwobbling Pivot (New York: New Directions, 1954)

Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. by Ezra Pound (San Francisco: City Lights, 1936)

Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Ezra Pound and Confucianism (Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1992)

Ronald Bush, The Genesis of Ezra Pound's Cantos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976)

  

Augustine's Ordo Amoris and Keller's Counterfeit Gods

Augustine’s ordo amoris and Keller’s Jacob together: the painful wrestling that reorders desire, leaving us dependent on God’s grace.

In his book "Counterfeit Gods",  Timothy Keller ( 1950 – 2023: American Presbyterian pastor, preacher, theologian, and Christian Apologist) references  Jacob's nocturnal wrestling match in Genesis 32. Far from a curious or marginal episode, Keller presents it as a paradigm for how human beings truly encounter God.

Read alongside Augustine's doctrine of ordo amoris--the right ordering of love--the story becomes not merely dramatic, but diagnostic: it exposes how spiritual transformation occurs through the painful reordering of desire.

Augustine's central claim is that sin is not best understood as loving evil things, but as loving good things wrongly. Created goods--security, success, approval, even blessing--become destructive when they are elevated to ultimate status. "My weight is my love," Augustine writes in the Confessions; what we love most pulls us in a particular direction, shaping our character and destiny. The problem is not that the heart loves too much, but that it loves in the wrong order.

Jacob is a vivid embodiment of this condition. His life has been defined by cunning, manipulation, and self-reliance. He seeks blessing, but on his own terms; he wants security without vulnerability, promise without dependence. In Keller's striking phrase, Jacob is a "con artist," not because he loves bad things, but because he attempts to extract blessing from God without surrendering control.

Augustine would say that Jacob's loves are mis-ranked: God is useful, but not supreme.

The wrestling match at the Jabbok becomes the moment when this disorder is confronted. Crucially, Jacob meets God alone. The encounter is personal, stripped of props and strategies. And it is not serene or contemplative, but agonistic. Keller stresses that real engagement with God feels like wrestling precisely because God contradicts us. Augustine anticipates this psychological realism: the reordering of love involves inner conflict because the will resists the loss of its idols. Conversion is not a gentle adjustment but a profound disturbance.

The turning point comes when Jacob is wounded. God touches his hip, and Jacob's strength collapses. Paradoxically, this is not the end of the struggle but its resolution. Jacob stops striving and starts clinging. He no longer wrestles to win; he holds on in dependence. Augustine's theology of grace is unmistakably present here. The human will cannot heal or reorder itself; it must be acted upon. Grace does not merely assist our projects--it dismantles them. Jacob's limp is the bodily sign that his deepest love has been dethroned.

Yet Jacob is also blessed and renamed. He becomes Israel, "the one who struggles with God and prevails." Keller emphasises the paradox: Jacob wins by losing. Augustine would recognise this as the restoration of right order. God is no longer a means to an end, but the end itself. Other goods may still be loved, but now in relation to God rather than in competition with Him. True freedom, for Augustine, is not autonomy but rightly ordered dependence.

The lasting limp matters. Jacob is not perfected; he is transformed. Augustine is equally insistent that conversion leaves marks. The soul bears the memory of its reordering; humility replaces confidence, gratitude replaces control. Spiritual maturity is not marked by triumphalism, but by a certain vulnerability--a way of walking that remembers grace.

Read together, Keller and Augustine converge on a single insight: spiritual change occurs not when we try harder, but when we love differently. Jacob's struggle is the drama of ordo amoris enacted in flesh and bone.  We might conclude, then that to encounter God is to be wounded in our false strengths, so that our loves may be healed and reordered. The promise then becomes: what we lose is self-sufficiency; what we gain is God Himself.

References:

• Augustine. (1998). Confessions (H. Chadwick, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work ca. 397–400 CE)
• Keller, T. (2009). Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters. Dutton

Envy Redeemed

 

An Allegorical Poem in Three Movements

THE ARGUMENT

The Poet, musing on the torment of envy, conceives it as a fallen spirit, self-consumed and wandering through the wastes of the soul. Envy laments its curse before the bright Spirit of Charity, who rebukes and then redeems it. In the end, the fires of malice are turned to light, and the two ascend together toward the dawn of Grace.

i. THE VOICE OF ENVY

Lo, I arise from caverns of the mind,
Where never dawn hath shone, nor quiet dwelt.
I am the worm that feedeth on the root,
When yet the fruit is green upon the bough;
The canker hid, that drinketh of the sap,
And turneth sweetness into dust and gall.

ii. THE DIALOGUE OF ENVY AND CHARITY

ENVY
I wander as a shadow ’mid the blest,
A spirit self-consuming, bound in spite.

CHARITY
O child unblest, thou hast not known thy thirst.
It is not others’ plenty that condemns,
But thine own emptiness that maketh pain.

ENVY
I walk among them, yet I cannot rest,
Each joy I see doth wound my heart with fire.

CHARITY
Then yield thy stings; lay down thy fires to rest.
Their heat shall serve the altar, not the pit.

ENVY
Can such as I be turned to light and peace?

CHARITY
Yea, by contrition, by love’s gentle might.
Thy thousand serpents change to threads of light,
And every coil is loosed into a star.

ENVY
What grace is this? I feel the chains unbind,
The weight of many ages melt away.

iii. THE REDEMPTION OF ENVY

So shall it be for all who envy’s snare
Have felt, and by contrition are made clean.
For love is stronger than the serpent’s guile,
And mercy keepeth watch where pride is tamed.

A Miltonic riff

Oct 2025

A Kelling Memory

 

Autumn and winter days at our cottage in Kelling were marked occasionally by the arrival of guests of the Kelling estate. These guests - paying guests - came for the entertainment offered by the regular pheasant shoots. Here is a reflection, written as the spent pellets rained upon our cottage conservatory. It was completed in Oxfordshire sunshine a few days ago.

The Reluctant Sportsman

The guns speak a fate. Keep 
Brave as the birds break cover.
Squeeze the trigger. The flock in disarray
Hovers then darts loose over the fields.
Shame hinges on a miss. This
Is what we expected. The land over stiles
Marks an escape. I am reptile.

The guns settle. Held, not fired.
Brave as the birds break cover.
Finger stays curled. The flock in disarray
Hovers then darts loose over the fields.
No one sees the stillness. This
Is not what was expected. The land over stiles
Marks a passage. I stay human.

The grass parts. A rustle speaks.
Brave as the sky calls danger.
Muscle recalls the flint of air
As bodies scatter, low and rising.
A crack behind. Not struck. This
Time, still breathing. The land over stiles
Means a distance. I am creature.

Kelling October 2015/Oxon July 2025

• Stanzas 2 and 3 developed with assistance of Co-Pilot AI

Treescape in Watercolour 2022

Tracks: A Revision after a Decade

 

The tracks hold signs of wisdom planted
Full deep in the way. Here a flame
Burns and flickers, flickers, burns
And lights rocks against rock,
Another shadow, a different shade,
A shiver of memory thrust to mind.

At the broken stile, a figure stood.
Not stranger, not guide.
He said:
What you carry was not gathered,
But given—before the path began.

To survive in this wild place
In this wilderness scaffold, simply face
The shades as they speak of times made strange
By current tread.

The dead speak in fire,
Not in voice or name.
Hold fast to that light. It shines
Miraculous, though too often maligned.

 

-          -    Kelling July 2015/Oxon July 2025

• Stanza 2 developed with  assistance of Co-Pilot AI, with reference to Eliot's "Compound ghost" in "Little Gidding"

G

T

Writing in the manner of TSE's Ariel Poems

Sometimes, at the edge of feeling, there is fear -
Sometimes a turbulence appears
And there is madness,
Madness manifested in monstrous and fearful ways
 - Swansea Dec 1973

At the Verge

Sometimes, at the edge of feeling, there is fear—
Not the child's fright at darkened halls,
Nor the candle's twitch at unseen breath—
But the quiet fear that wakes at four,
Where silence hangs like wet linen in alleys of the soul.

The hour is neither dream nor waking,
But the bell between two bells—
A waiting, a weight, a windless turning
Where no angel guards the lintel.

Sometimes a turbulence appears—
Not of the sky, nor sea, nor the city’s restless thrum,
But beneath the ribcage:
A ripple, a grinding, a storm that will not pass—
Madness.

Madness not in flame or thunder,
But in the order of things unhinged—
The tea poured into a shoe,
The child answering the empty chair,
The mother forgetting her child’s name
As if it were never spoken.

And so madness manifested in monstrous and fearful ways:
The eyes that gleam too bright in crowds,
The voice too calm in confession,
The laugh that echoes where laughter does not belong.

Sometimes the world turns inside out—
And we, gentle bearers of reason,
Are no more than cracked vases on the altar,
Spilling the dust of meaning into the wind.

Yet still, the bird sings at the chimney pot,
The clock ticks its futile benediction,
And the bread rises.

So we go, between verse and void,
With pocket-watches and whispered prayers,
Hoping the threshold holds.

June 2025

This poem was produced using AI, feeding Co-Pilot with the seed lines from an old poem of mine, and a request to deliver something in the style of TSE.

Here is the original poem, with a critique and illustration by Gemini AI (Click/Tap to view)

A Poem in the Manner of EP

 

The ages fade daily from memory,
but an instant calls to mind,

times thought lost through dull decay.

-- Tours: Nov 1971

Palimpsest

An ink-smudge on papyrus—
ghost-hand of Charax in the margin,
"νοῦς ἀνθρώπου—" and the reed bends.

Clamour of looms in Nineveh,
threads humming patterns
no eye remains to read.

Rust eats the bronze mirror
at the base of the Acropolis;
I see my face in it,
fractured—
half Helen, half the boy from Tyre
whose sandals wore a path to the salt market.

A gull cries.
Concrete breaks its own silence.

Words come in fragments:
"– et in Arcadia…"
"—ye towers of Ilium…"
They lie like bone shards
in the posthole of a vanished hut.

No elegy is whole.

Yet, in a metro tunnel,
fluorescent and wet with transit hum,
I glimpse her—
an eyelash curve,
a gesture from an older grammar.

Time uncoils.
Memory is not kind,
but sudden.

- Oxon: May 2025

Footnotes

1. νοῦς ἀνθρώπου (nous anthrōpou) — Greek for "the mind of man." This phrase reflects classical philosophical thought, especially in Plato and Aristotle, where nous denotes the highest faculty of intellect or reason. The attribution to “Charax” may allude to Charax of Pergamon, a semi-legendary chronicler, here imagined as a marginal commentator in an ancient manuscript. The smudged ink emphasizes textual decay and the ghostliness of ancient knowledge.

2. Nineveh — The capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, famed for its architecture, gardens, and textile production. The "clamour of looms" references the lost industry and domestic life of ancient cities, preserved now only through archaeology and legend.

3. Bronze mirror / Acropolis — Mirrors in classical antiquity were often made from polished bronze. The Acropolis, Athens’s ancient citadel, becomes a stage for cultural erosion, the bronze mirror symbolizing faded self-knowledge and the inevitable corrosion of civilization's reflective capacities.

4. Helen / boy from Tyre — Helen of Troy embodies mythic beauty and destructive desire. The "boy from Tyre" may allude to mythological figures such as Cadmus or Europa's brother, or symbolically to young Phoenician traders, invoking early Mediterranean commerce and cultural diaspora. The juxtaposition suggests fragmented identity across time and myth.

5. Concrete breaks its own silence — A motif where inanimate materials gain agency. Concrete, emblem of modern civilization, is personified as it fractures—both literally and metaphorically—under the weight of history and memory.

6. "Et in Arcadia…" — Latin: "Even in Arcadia, there am I," traditionally interpreted as death’s reminder of its presence even in idealized realms. Associated with Poussin’s paintings and Baroque vanitas themes.

7. "Ye towers of Ilium…" — A line echoing Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, referencing the mythical city of Troy (Ilium). Symbolizes fallen civilizations, often used in literature as shorthand for the tragic arc of empire.

8. Bone shards / posthole of a vanished hut — An archaeological metaphor: postholes are traces left by decayed wooden structures; bone shards suggest fragmentary remains of life and culture. This image mirrors a preoccupation with cultural excavation and lost origins.

9. Metro tunnel / gesture from an older grammar — An allusion to Ezra Pound’s "In a Station of the Metro" ("The apparition of these faces in the crowd..."). The “older grammar” evokes pre-verbal or ancient systems of expression—bodily, symbolic, or mythic—still surfacing in the modern world.

10. Time uncoils / Memory is not kind, but sudden — A nod to involuntary memory (e.g., Proustian recall), where memory erupts unexpectedly. “Time uncoils” may also suggest a serpent or scroll—symbols of both danger and revelation.

This poem and the notes were produced using AI, feeding Co-Pilot with the seed lines from an old poem of mine, and a request to deliver something in the style of Ezra Pound

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T. S. Eliot’s Landscapes: A Four-Stage Formal Study

Abstract

This study offers a four-stage analysis of T. S. Eliot’s Landscapes poems—New Hampshire, Virginia, Usk, Rannoch by Glencoe, and Cape Ann—examining their poetic, philosophical, and dialectical dimensions. Drawing from Owen Barfield’s theory of participation (Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Wesleyan University Press, 1988) ¹ and Jewel Spears Brooker’s dialectical framework presented in her T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), the study traces how Eliot navigates shifting relationships between nature, memory, and spirit. The progression through close reading, philosophical lens, dialectical movement, and comparative synthesis reveals the sequence not merely as lyrical observation but as a metaphysical pilgrimage: from lyrical grief to reverent surrender, each landscape staging the evolution of poetic consciousness.

Stage I: Close Reading — Imagery, Tone, and Structure

Eliot’s Landscapes unfold as a sequence of spiritual interiors masquerading as natural vignettes. Each poem carefully modulates imagery, tone, and structural rhythm to enact not just place but metaphysical posture.

In New Hampshire, the orchard becomes an Eden recalled. Children’s voices harmonize with seasonal rhythms—“Cling, swing, Spring, sing”—but harmony is soon fractured by memory: “Twenty years and the spring is over.” The lyrical tone surrenders to elegiac disjunction.

Virginia opens with the slow movement of a “red river,” heat transmuted into silence. Nature is passive—the mockingbird sings only once, the trees wait. Fragmented syntax echoes emotional immobility. “Iron thoughts” travel with the speaker, reflecting unrelieved inner turmoil.

In Usk, brevity becomes pilgrimage. Mythic symbols—the white hart, the white well—are approached with reverent restraint. The landscape transforms into a chapel: “Lift your eyes / Where the roads dip…” The tone is contemplative, the structure aphoristic.

Rannoch, by Glencoe invokes a moor stripped of symbolism. “The crow starves… the stag breeds for the rifle.” Memory becomes a site of violence, historical silence resisting interpretation.

Cape Ann bursts with birdsong—“Quick quick quick…”—but cadence leads to surrender. The speaker yields the land to “its true owner, the sea gull.” Structure and tone converge on silence and release. 

Stage II: Philosophical Lens — Barfield and Brooker

Barfield’s theory of participation—a philosophical model of evolving human perception—helps map Eliot’s poetic consciousness: from original unity with nature, through modern detachment, into imaginative re-engagement. Brooker’s dialectical model complements this arc, framing Eliot’s movement from disjunction through ambivalence to spiritual transcendence.

In New Hampshire, original participation is evoked and then mourned. The orchard echoes unity, but memory intrudes. The speaker moves into onlooker consciousness, grieving a vanished mode of knowing.¹

In Virginia, nature becomes backdrop—passive and still. “Iron thoughts” reinforce isolation. Participation has fully withdrawn.

Usk gestures toward final participation. Myth is present but not pursued. The poet lifts his gaze, not his hand—a reverent posture grounded in humility and vision.

Rannoch by Glencoe offers only residual representation. The moor bears historical pain, but no symbolic comfort. Memory “beyond the bone” remains unspoken.

Cape Ann culminates in final participation. The speaker follows nature’s rhythm, then surrenders speech. “Resign this land…” signals a release into silent communion.

Stage III: Dialectical Movement — Brooker’s Model

Brooker’s dialectical framework—disjunction, ambivalence, and transcendence—provides a lens to trace Eliot’s poetic negotiations between intellect, emotion, and spirit.

New Hampshire holds ambivalence between lyrical beauty and irretrievable memory. Presence dissolves into cadence; ritual replaces possession.

In Virginia, movement stalls. Nature waits, the speaker remains inert. Disjunction dominates, and tension endures without transformation.

Usk opens toward transcendence. Myth is not seized but attended. The poet seeks vision, not mastery. Brooker’s theological poise—engagement through humility—emerges.

Rannoch offers only silence. The dialectic does not move. Eliot chooses ethical restraint over synthesis. Violence is acknowledged, not interpreted.

Cape Ann completes the arc. Birds lead, the speaker follows. The “palaver” ends; speech yields to presence. Transcendence arrives not in conquest, but in surrender.

Stage IV: Comparative Synthesis — Poetic and Philosophical Arc

Taken together, the Landscapes chart a metaphysical pilgrimage. Eliot’s early poems evoke unity only to mourn its loss. His middle poems inhabit restraint and silence. The final poem yields, releasing possession and reclaiming perception.

Nature evolves from symbolic Eden (New Hampshire), through emotional burden (Virginia), to sacred distance (Usk), historical resistance (Rannoch), and finally, sacramental presence (Cape Ann). The poetic voice transforms—from speaker to follower, from griever to pilgrim. Eliot’s dialectic is not a quest for resolution but a journey into humility. Landscape becomes lens—not to look outward, but inward.

Eliot’s Landscapes are less a journey across regions than a passage through modes of being. They dramatise how the poetic mind perceives, carries, questions, and finally surrenders to the world. Nature remains constant; what changes is the eyes that see it.

Footnote
¹ Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Wesleyan University Press, 1988. On original participation: “a dim consciousness that man and nature were somehow one.”

• Revised and developed, December 2025

T.S.Eliot Reading "Landscapes"

I found this quite by accident recently, whilst doing a Google search on "no concurrence of bone". Those words were triggered in my memory when discussing with an old friend the last line "And Zero at the Bone" in Emily Dickinson's "A narrow Fellow in the Grass". 

Thanks to this random thread of events, the piece now also appears on the T.S.Eliot Society website at www.tseliotsociety.uk

T.S. Eliot reads Landscapes from Don Yorty on Vimeo.

I. New Hampshire

Children's voices in the orchard
Between the blossom- and the fruit-time:
Golden head, crimson head,
Between the green tip and the root.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over;
Twenty years and the spring is over;
To-day grieves and to-morrow grieves,
Cover me over, light-in-leaves;
Golden head, black wing,
Cling,swing,
Spring,sing,
Swing up into the apple-tree.

II. Virginia

Red river, red river,
Slow flow heat is silence
No will is still as a river
Still. Will heat move
Only through the mocking-bird
Heard once? Still hills
Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,
White trees, wait, wait,
Delay, decay. Living, living,
Never moving. Ever moving
Iron thoughts came with me
And go with me:
Red river river river.

III. Usk

Do not suddenly break the branch, or
Hope to find
The white hart behind the white well.
Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell
Old enchantments. Let them sleep.
"Gently dip, but not too deep,"
Lift your eyes
Where the roads dip and where the roads rise
Seek only there
Where the grey light meets the green air
The hermit's chapel, the pilgrim's prayer.

IV. Rannoch, by Glencoe

Here the crow starves, here the patient stag
Breeds for the the rifle. Between the soft moor
and the soft sky, scarcely room
To leap or to soar. Substance crumbles, in the thin air
Moon cold or moon hot. The road winds in
Listlessness of ancient war,
Langour of broken steel,
Clamour of confused wrong, apt
In silence. Memory is strong
Beyond the bone. Pride snapped,
Shadow of pride is long, in the long pass
No concurrence of bone.

V. Cape Ann

O quick quick quick, quick hear the song sparrow,
Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow
At dawn and dusk. Follow the dance
Of goldfinch at noon. Leave to chance
The Blackburnian warbler, the shy one. Hail
With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bob-white
Dodging the bay-bush. Follow the feet
Of the walker, the water-thrush. Follow the flight
Of the dancing arrow, the purple martin. Greet
In silence the bullbat. All are delectable. Sweet sweet sweet
But resign this land at the end, resign it
To its true owner, the tough one, the sea-gull.
The palaver is finished.

1933-1934

Encounter Near Cefn Coed : A Memory

This picture by Van Gogh, painted in 1890, two months before his death, appeared in the recent (May 2019) Van Gogh and Britain exhibition at Tate Britain. It is called “At Eternity’s Gate: Sorrowing Old Man” and was made in the institution at St. Remy de Provence. 

At Eternity’s Gate: Sorrowing Old Man

At the exhibition, it appeared below a paraphrased quotation by the artist, written in 1880. The paraphrased quotation  was:

“You may not always be able to say what it is that confines you and yet you feel I know not what bars … and then you ask yourself Dear God, is this for long? Is this forever? Is this for eternity?”

The word “bars” triggered in me a memory of a ditty I wrote 45-odd years ago now, where the word “bars” also appears. The ditty follows below.

Encounter Near Cefyn Coed

Cefn Coed Hospital is a mental health facility in the Sketty area of Swansea, Wales. It is currently managed by the Swansea Bay University Health Board.

A man was a joker and wandered the park
And he met with a stranger, alone
He asked, in a hurry, in the lateness and dark
For a hint of the secrets he’d known

He should have been wiser, but nevertheless
His mind was the kind that would roam
The reason was hard, it was everyone’s guess
He’d not come from a broken up home

“Won’t you tell me, my friend” he said as he stopped
“What you’re doing out here in the night?
And can you explain why your hair is all cropped
And your coat isn’t buttoned up right?”

“It’s not easy for me,” the other replied
“To show you the place I have been
All my life I have tried, to finish the ride
On an endless and circular dream

I was born in a pain, as I think, I don’t know
I cannot remember so well.
These strange things you see I had hoped would not show
They belong to another, you can tell?

Now I amble alone all over the earth
Though my wisdom would reach for the stars;
And all because of a difficult birth
Which has put my whole world behind bars.”

A man was a joker, and wandered the park
And he met with a stranger alone
He learned in a hurry, in the lateness and dark
How secrets are a burden, once known

Swansea: May 1973