Tag Archives

Waterloo

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

1816 was the ‘year of no summer’.

Volcanic ash from the Dutch East Indies

darkened Europe’s skies. Mount Tambora,

amid the savannahs of Sumbawa,

had erupted the previous year.

So June 1815 was unseasonably

wet, particularly in Belgium.


Escaped from Elba, Bonaparte had rallied

France, almost expunging Blucher’s Prussians

in Wallonia. At Waterloo,

on the morning of the 8th, Napoleon –

once begetter of Le Code Civil

Des Français before he crowned himself –

waited for the ground to dry in order

to deploy his cavalry to best effect.

However, Blucher’s remnants joined Wellington’s

‘scum of the earth’, and Boney rode from the field

in tears. His ‘critical error’ became

part of the military syllabus.


Add choice and pride to physics and chance

butterflies too can make a right mess of things.

FROM THE TERRACE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read373 views

Begun the year of Waterloo, finished

in that of Peterloo, built on rents

and sugar, this – according to Pevsner –

‘modest’ Palladian mansion sits

on a slope, a belvedere. Mature trees

overhang the erstwhile stable block,

now a spa. The hotel is a venue

for weddings – featured in ‘Bride of the Year’ –

and funerary teas, like today’s in sun.

 

From the terrace, and over the ha-ha,

sheep graze in broad fields hedged with hawthorn,

pasture that stretches to sparse, managed woodland.

Beyond, as if added by some British

landscape artist – a Constable, Turner,

Wilson – there is an horizon of low hills

beneath a sky of indefinable blue.

 

We do not talk about the wealth of nations,

about the origins of money,

about enclosures or slavery.

This early evening, after the rites, as if

what we see were not a trick

of the eye, and what we know were not a sleight

of words, we are relaxed about dying.

 

 

 

OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS

i.m. John Wareham

 

The tide of chance may bring
Its offer; but nought avails it!

THE OPPORTUNITY Thomas Hardy

 

Each week on Tuesday promptly at seven –

chicken curry and chips from Barry Wong’s

on West Derby Road at the ready –

he and I would turn on the TV

in our rented rooms to watch Hughie Greene’s

‘Opportunity Knocks’.  It was an hour –

including adverts – of metaphors

of the mid-sixties: kitsch; schmaltz; condescension;

nudge-nudge; the cruelty of class; fifteen

seconds of fame; occasional talents.

 

We had no doubt we were poets – actual

not aspiring. Would we settle for minor

recognition – or would only major count?

How this would happen we never discussed.

Maybe we hoped we would be discovered

like others in their twenties in the city!

 

I can see him now chortling at the absurd –

his laughter bubbling, his kindly eyes gleeful.

He was an admirer of Thomas Hardy,

ever the collector of the bathos

of pretentiousness and misfortune.

He told me tales about the writer’s heart.

Hardy had willed, though an atheist,

his body be buried in the churchyard

of the village in which he had been born.

But his young widow was strong-armed by the Dean

of Westminster Abbey. Her husband’s ashes

were interred in Poets’ Corner near Dickens’.

His heart, however, was preserved, and borne

in a biscuit tin – Huntley & Palmers

Bath Olivers, it was claimed – from Paddington

or Waterloo to Dorchester then Stinsford.

One tale had the heart buried in the tin.

Another, the tin being on the grave digger’s

kitchen table with, for some reason, the lid

off, maintained the family cat ate it.

 

He published little. Re-reading what he wrote

when we lodged together in Liverpool

I am shocked by the matureness of his talent,

and his ability to make the mundane

original, significant, portentous:

Spareness is the point.

November’s manifest in skies of ash,

Branches whittled by the edge

Of winter, the parkland quite

Quit of final birds.

And how his, over years, has shaped my work,

like an underground, uncharted watercourse.

 

 

 

LAMENT FOR BERSHAM IRON WORKS

Not for the hard, life-denying graft of it

or the danger, not for the polluting smoke

or the banishing of bird song,

not for the exploitation and social

upheaval, least of all for its cannons

at Naseby, Bunker Hill, Waterloo,

but for its madness, the sheer reach of it,

the invention of it, the ambition,

the defiance, the rhythmical creak

of the horse-drawn gin pumping water

from the river, the sulphurous roars

of the furnace, the forge hammers pounding

through the ancient woods, along Offa’s Dyke,

their echoes dying…