Number 122: On calm full moon nights, the sea, stars and my Winchester in 1976 on the Minesweepers’ Bridge. With me so often to far-away places, Prescribed for Matric 1974, The Winchester and I have been together a long time:

“Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds …”

“Death be not Proud …”

“Fair daffodils we weep to see you haste away so soon… We have short time to stay as you, We have as short a spring”   

“When I consider how my light is spent …”

“The ploughman homeward plods his weary way…”  (18 ways of applying precisely these words in a sentence!).

“Not all that tempts your wand’ring eyes …  is lawful prize; nor all, that glisters, gold”.  

“Never seek to tell thy love, Love that never told can be…”

“The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”

“The music in my heart I bore long after it was heard no more.”

“Ah love let us be true To one another! For the world which seems to lie before us like a land of dreams,…  Hath really neither joy, … Nor certitude nor peace nor help for pain and we are here as on a darkling plain Swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight where ignorant armies clash by night.” 

“If I should die think only this of me… “

“This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.”

“Time was away and somewhere else…”

“Look stranger on this island now the leaping light for your delight discovers….”

“About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters…”

“Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs about the lilting house …”

Poetry learned by heart becomes part of us, a “store of memories, conscious and unconscious, on which the imagination can feed.”  “Felt in the blood and along the heart; …”with an (inward) eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy” as Wordsworth puts it: “We see into the life of things”.