[Carol Taylor]

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<tr><td>Talking to Lord Newborough

I’d perch beside your gravestone years ago,
a boy who thought you old at forty-three.
I knew you loved this quiet place, like me.
We’d gaze towards Maentwrog far below,
kindred spirits, and I’d talk to you.
Sometimes I asked what it was like to die—
were you afraid? You never did reply,
and silence rested lightly on us two.

These days the past is nearer, so I came
to our remembered refuge on the hill,
expecting change yet finding little there:
my village and the Moelwyns look the same,
Saint Michael’s Church commands the valley still—
but you, old friend, are younger than you were.

<FONT >blank(Lt. William Charles Wynn, 1873-1916,
blank 4th Baron Newborough, whose grave overlooks
blank the Vale of Ffestiniog in North Wales)

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[center]<table bgcolor=white cellpadding=25 border=0><tr><td>The scene and situation are set at once, so that communication is clear at the surface level. The mystery occurs at a deeper level, and is subtler, in what the poem suggest about memory and time: "These days the past is nearer." We think of the past as retreating into a farther distance, as do the dead, but this poem reverses that notion, and implies that the dead "remember" with us.

I found myself feeling not only surprised, but persuaded by this tender but unsentimental sense of identification with those who are closer than they were when they "left" us, because now we're approaching them. The end feels wholly true, and the force of the poem is greater than it would have been if the language were not so unobtrusively ordinary.

And then, just to compound the strangeness of the poem, a rereading reminds you that this particular "old friend" was a stranger, after all, "met" beside his gravestone by an imaginative and senstive boy! Remarkable poem.

~Rhina

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[Terese Coe]

Not much question who wrote this! It's one of the lightest and airiest poems about the dead I've ever seen. I applaud that quality. For me it brings up the question of reincarnation: whether the speaker is in fact an emanation of the dead man. I much admire Rhina's comment: "We think of the past as retreating into a farther distance, as do the dead, but this poem reverses that notion, and implies that the dead 'remember' with us."

Whether or not they do remember with us is, for all practical purposes, irrelevant; it gives comfort to think so, and in the face of death we take comfort where we can.

Terese

[Robt_Ward]

I'd add to the above commentaries that the last line is extraordinarily whimsical and spot-on true:

These days the past is nearer, so I came
to our remembered refuge on the hill,
expecting change yet finding little there:
my village and the Moelwyns look the same,
Saint Michael’s Church commands the valley still—
but you, old friend, are younger than you were.

When the boy first "met" Lord N he'd thought him "old" (he died at age 43, according to the footnote), but when he returns the only thing that's changed is that 43 now looks young to the man-that-was-the-boy. Subtle, sweet...

(robt)

[Tim Murphy]

If you believe as I do that our task is to get our arms round the three thousand years of our tradition and somehow converse with it, the poem has even greater poignancy. Not a poem about poetry, but if I recall aright, somebody might have said on the thread when it was workshopped: I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now. Hell of a first rate sonnet.

[Kevin Andrew Murphy]

There's a certain interesting decorum that goes on beside a stranger's graveside or monument. I remember once walking across a lawn at Pomona college with my sister and she was swallowed up to her ankles by quicksand mud. We went to wash her feet off in a memorial fountain for a student who'd died in 1922 at age 21. My sister didn't want to be sacrilegious or disrespectful, but followed my logic that he was our age and would be cool with it. So we laughed and joked with him while she got the mud off.

[nyctom]

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[This message has been edited by nyctom (edited December 07, 2004).]

[Rose Kelleher]

Ditto, Tom. This poet is never cheaply sentimental, but often sticks his neck out by expressing sincere emotion. He routinely does what so many are afraid to do, or can't do without going over the top, conveying (gasp!) unabashedly warm affection for friends or family. That takes remarkable integrity in a poetry world whose all-too-often mindless, Pavlovian response to anything warm in poetry is to sneer and label it sentimental. It's precisely this risk-taking that makes this poet one of my all-time favorites.

Oh, yeah, the poem. I like it too, for reasons others have covered. I'll just add that I enjoy the subtle contradictions in the last line: the "old" friend being "younger", and the idea that he's younger than he was in the past. (Made me think of the Dylan song, too.) Of course what he really means is that 43 doesn't look so old any more, but the clever way of saying it makes it that much more memorable.


[This message has been edited by Rose Kelleher (edited December 01, 2004).]

[Susan McLean]

Graceful and touching poem. My one problem with it is L4, which sounded like a four-beat line to my ear. That is primarily because I don't have a clue about how to pronounce the Welsh place name. I would guess two syllables, applying English pronunciation to the letters, but it seems that it would take three to fit in the line comfortably. I am aware that "towards" is pronounced with two syllables in Britain, though I have always pronounced it with one. I think this is most likely going to be a problem for any place names that are not generally known and that look as though they could be pronounced with a varying number of syllables. I'm not suggesting that the name be eliminated, but just pointing out the problems such names create in metrical poems. If they can be framed in a way that allows no possible confusion about syllable count, that would help. After all, the key is not to get the reader to pronounce it right, but merely not to stumble on the meter at that spot.

Susan

[Greek Streak]

If one might be interested in the opinion of a reader whose native language is not English and who has no training in metrical poetry, please let me congratulate the authors of my three favorite poems from this fine selection of 18.

This one is my second personal best.

Congratulations,
Tonia

[Janet Kenny]

I agree with all that Rhina says here. The marvel of the poem is the alteration in relative ages of the two "friends". I heard a discussion about Camus this morning. They spoke of his realisation, at the grave of his father, that he was older than his father. It is a moment of understanding, This poem has captured it wonderfully.
Janet