PICKINGS

Poetry from NHI publications



WORDSWORTH HOUSE, COCKERMOUTH
Lakeland for you a treasure-chest
huge, inexhaustible. This house
(till eight) nurtured a growing taste
for stylish comfort — pedimented door
tucked-away windowseat, pembroke table
ribbon-backed chair. But Cockermouth's
tame frontier glimpsed mysterious peaks
of Borrowdale. You saw, were drawn
to a tumult of wild mountains.

Hawkshead schooldays found you freedom
to explore the Esthwaite water
joy in a small boy's pleasures —
voice-echoes on ice, the bittern's boom
a whitemantled swan's andante flight
mimic hoot to owls in rustic copses.

From solitude
your own staid character, a poet's eye
you found contentment in the rough
unhewn stone of houses tucked in hollows
smoke firing high columns from slated roofs
simplicities of a countryside just
beginning to be visited.

Reading your Guide To The Lakes
I am captured by pictures
sunbursts on known scenes
the clarity of May mornings
a painter's shadows cast by evening light.
Can find in prose the great poet
proving his City of Gold.
M.A.B. JONES
from
New Hope International, 1982

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This page last updated: 24th November 2005.