Isle of Wight

Once upon a time, fifty eight years ago,

I got a bus I did not normally get.

It took me down a street where I had not been

since I was a child. I passed the house –

English farmhouse-style, four-square, low roofed,

the small orchard intact – where we live now.

I noted then how out of place it seemed

in a street of petit-bourgeois villas,

Victorian and Edwardian.

I thought of Tennyson on the Isle of Wight,

after the publication of ‘The Charge…’.

The lane outside his house became so filled

with fans, who had taken the ferry

across the Solent, that he had built

wooden steps and a walkway above the lane,

so that he could go unmolested

each morning into the beech woods, and return

his signature hat in the crook of his arm

brimming with wild mushrooms.