[Holly Martins]

Richard, I'm not cracking this up as a great poem but it's very charming - the Georgians were good at the sweet and charming - and it makes a nice change from some of the ugly, dreary, shocking stuff written at the time. Translation: 'When beauty's hour was overcast' means the end of the beautiful summer's day, or the end of a mythical Golden Age.

[Allen Tice]

Holly seems right on to me, Richard. What I personally don't yet grok is "clouds of hawthorn." I want it to respond to the "overcast" line. I have to assume it refers to flowers.

[Richard Epstein]

Mr Whitworth,

Yes, Yeats did start out behind the Georgian 8 ball; that's why his growth was so necessary and is so impressive (and why, alas, he needed to credit Pound's assistance in jump starting the process).

Ms Martin and Mr Tice,

Yes, I could come up with an explanation of each of the shadowy lines; I meant only to point out how vague and abstract the poem is, how heavily it relies on the automatic responses generated by poesy-fied words and how little that response is earned.

The ephemeral clouds of hawthorn (it is almost the only concrete image in the poem) are the tree's spring blossoms, a cloud which does not last and which, inevitably, ends up on my sidewalk or lawn, insisting on being raked and swept.

RHE

[Clive Watkins]

A few personal snippets, none important....

I’m broadly with John and Holly on this one – though, unlike John, I do read (some) Pound. But then I read only some Georgians, of course. (I, too, have James Reeves’s anthology.)

We have a hawthorn tree in our garden. There are hawthorns all along the lane (Park Lane) which begins only two hundred yards from our door and runs away through the fields. There were two hawthorns in the garden I knew as a boy. They have nasty thorns but pretty blossom and berries; their branches have a tendency to grow together in a dense mass.

John Drinkwater is buried in the churchyard of the tiny north-Oxfordshire church in which my paternal grandparents, Job and Phoebe, were married in 1908. Job was an agricultural worker and particularly adept at making quickset hedges, in which hawthorn was prized for creating an impenetrable barrier.

Clive