February Poem
The hours of daylight must be lengthening now:
I walked among the frost and noticed how
The last, softening snowdrops were in thaw;
Then, stepping between flecks of shadow, saw
The first collapse of crocuses begun,
Yellowy in small fritterings of sun.
Ridiculous with delight, I hurried home.
But I stare from a winter-facing room
To think how premature the petal-fall
Of laurustinus by the churchyard wall;
And as the minutes edge me from the light
Into this perceptibly shorter night,
I sense a northerly gathering air
Prising another bud of my despair.
[from The Night Bathers, 1970]
As a teenager I was a big fan of Ted Walker's poetry and I have four of his collections: The Night Bathers, Fox on a Barn Door, The Solitairies, and Gloves to the Hangman with its wonderful poem Pig Pig about a 1386 tribunal in Falaise that sentenced a pig to be 'mangled and maimed in the head and forelegs, and then to be hanged, for having torn the face and arms of a child and thus caused its death'. The pig was first dressed in man's clothes.
In the early 70s, I had the great joy of being Chairman of the Literary Society at the then Ipswich Civic College where we were given quite a nifty budget to promote poetry and similar. Pretty much carte blanch to spend it as I saw fit too. Wouldn't get that kind of trust and investment in the arts nowadays, especially in an FE College [no fucking mission statement; no fucking financial audit]. Amongst a variety of writers and other things organised that I can't fully remember, I did get Ted Walker to come and give a reading for us. We took him out for a curry afterwards and I must have talked the biggest load of absolutely and genuinely earnest and enthusiastic bollocks about poetry and probably politics. I'm sure I got very drunk. Just hope Ted saw potential somewhere amongst all that teenage joy.
In my early years of teaching in the 80s I often used Ted Walker's poetry. I chose this poem today because it is February and it is a sonnet and, in a convention I wholly understand, Walker merges seasonal reference with a touch of self-pity.
