PICKINGS

Poetry from NHI publications

WORDSWORTH HOUSE, COCKERMOUTH
Lakeland for you a treasure-chest huge, inexhaustible. This house (till eight) nurtured a growing taste for stylish comfort — pedimented door tucked-away windowseat, pembroke table ribbon-backed chair. But Cockermouth's tame frontier glimpsed mysterious peaks of Borrowdale. You saw, were drawn to a tumult of wild mountains. Hawkshead schooldays found you freedom to explore the Esthwaite water joy in a small boy's pleasures — voice-echoes on ice, the bittern's boom a whitemantled swan's andante flight mimic hoot to owls in rustic copses. From solitude your own staid character, a poet's eye you found contentment in the rough unhewn stone of houses tucked in hollows smoke firing high columns from slated roofs simplicities of a countryside just beginning to be visited. Reading your Guide To The Lakes I am captured by pictures sunbursts on known scenes the clarity of May mornings a painter's shadows cast by evening light. Can find in prose the great poet proving his City of Gold.
M.A.B. JONES

WORDSWORTH HOUSE, COCKERMOUTH

Lakeland for you a treasure-chest
huge, inexhaustible. This house
(till eight) nurtured a growing taste
for stylish comfort — pedimented door
tucked-away windowseat, pembroke table
ribbon-backed chair. But Cockermouth's
tame frontier glimpsed mysterious peaks
of Borrowdale. You saw, were drawn
to a tumult of wild mountains.

Hawkshead schooldays found you freedom
to explore the Esthwaite water
joy in a small boy's pleasures —
voice-echoes on ice, the bittern's boom
a whitemantled swan's andante flight
mimic hoot to owls in rustic copses.

From solitude
your own staid character, a poet's eye
you found contentment in the rough
unhewn stone of houses tucked in hollows
smoke firing high columns from slated roofs
simplicities of a countryside just
beginning to be visited.

Reading your Guide To The Lakes
I am captured by pictures
sunbursts on known scenes
the clarity of May mornings
a painter's shadows cast by evening light.
Can find in prose the great poet
proving his City of Gold.

M.A.B. JONES

from
New Hope International, 1982

Next poem
Previous poem

Pickings
NHI home page
Books
Magazines

Web design by Gerald England
This page last updated: 24th November 2005.