Au revoir for the month of August . . .

The Guv'nor at Wandlebury

This post is just to wish folk a good summer. I'm on vacation during the coming month and won't be checking my emails nor blogging - I intend simply to sleep, eat, read (mostly Bloch I think), walk and cycle (the Pashley Guv'nor) around the Cambridgeshire/Suffolk/North Essex countryside.  The photo above was from today's ride in which I went through Wandlebury when the temperature hit 29C. Hmmm, nice.

So, thanks for all your support over the last year - face to face and digitally - I value your comments and contributions hugely. I look forward to meeting you all again one way or another in September.

Michael Roberts

As a meditation for the summer I leave you with one of my favourite poems by Michael Roberts whose work I discovered in my teens and have valued ever since. I had a plan, once upon a time, to do my masters dissertation on his work or even concentrate on him for a doctorate. In the end I did my masters dissertation on Robert Travers Herford and since I neither want nor need a PhD I'll stick to reading Roberts for pleasure and enlightenment. A much better idea methinks.

It is, as I said, one of my favourite poems but it is a very challenging one whose truth I feel daily. Make of it what you will. If you fancy posting a comment please do but please note I won't be able to get them up until I log on again in September.

ON READING SOME NEGLECTED POETS

This is a long road in a dubious mist;
Not with any groan nor any heard complaint
We march, uncomprehending, not expecting Time
To show us beacons.

When we have struggled on a little farther
This madness will yield of itself,
There will not be any singing or sudden joy,
But a load will be set down.

And maybe no one will ever come,
No other traveller passing that way,
Therefore the load we lifted will be left,
A milestone, insignificant.


(You can find this in his, alas out of print, Collected Poems, Faber & Faber, London, 1958 or, alas also out of print, Frederick Grubb (ed.), Michael Roberts: Selected Poems and Prose, Carcanet Press, 1980).