And lavender and margueritenForge with their flowers an English sky.n”Turn now towards the belling townnYour jigsaws of impossible bone,nAnd rising read your rank of snownAccurate as death upon the stone.”nAbout your easy heads my prayersnI said with syllables of clay.n”What gift,” I asked, “shall I bring nownBefore I weep and walk away?”nTake, they replied, the oak and laurel.nTake our fortune of tears and livenLike a spendthrift lover. All we asknIs the one gift you cannot give.nAs a small boy, entranced by the written word, I nevernhad the slightest desire to drive a locomotive, pilot annaircraft, captain a ship. The supreme achievement seemednto me to be that of one who had written a book: any kind ofnbook. All through my teenage years I struggled with thenshort story, the novel, the play, the poem. I was like the mannin the story who leapt on his horse and tried to ride off in allndirections. Another difficulty lay in finding something tonwrite about. I looked at the circumstance of my small-townnrural life and decided, with supreme snobbishness, that itndidn’t match up to my literary ambitions. Unfailingly, Inwrote about worlds I had never known. Poetry — and poetrynwas becoming my principal interest — was away and somewherenelse. Nobody told me that the raw material of poetry,nlike the raw material of all art, resides quite simply undernone’s nose. Certainly, this didn’t become plain to me untilnmy experience of the Second World War.nPoets are often asked, in a dauntingly high-flown phrase,nhow and when they are “inspired.” For myself, too often atnsuch moments a deeply superstitious Celt, this is a word bestnavoided. If you ask me why I write, I would say that I writenbecause I must. It’s a compulsion, and — with luck — anmeans of resolving inner conflict. Poetry, for me, has been anparticular form of autobiography. The general theme ofnone’s work becomes self-evident, I think, in its early writtennstages, but the subjects may be many and various. Andnthere’s a certain danger in a too-active search for a subject.nIn my experience, a subject consciously sought is rarelynfound. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge who warned us,nwisely, that the writer’s greatest danger is impatience. “Wenmust be right by nature,” says Coleridge, “so that goodnthoughts may come before us like free children of Cod andnsay Here we are.”nAgain on a visit to France, to Normandy, wandering in angreat gloomy cathedral, I came quite unexpectedly on anshort prose inscription, dated 1762, on a stone crucifix. Inscribbled down a rough translation; later found myselfnalmost inexplicably haunted by it. But the prose I found flatnand unsatisfying, and I couldn’t rest until I had tried tondevelop it into a formal poem, a sonnet, in English. Here itnis.nI am the great sun, but you do not see me.nI am your husband, but you turn away.nI am the captive, but you do not free me,nI am the captain you will not obey.nI am the truth, but you will not believe me,nI am the city where you will not stay.nI am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,nI am that God to whom you will not pray.nI am your counsel, but you do not hear me,nI am the lover whom you will betray.nI am the victor, but you do not cheer me,nI am the holy dove whom you will slay.nI am your life, but if you will not name me.nSeal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.nIthink it important always to remember that there is — ornthat there should be — more to a poem than what actuallynlies on the page. We must be sensitive to its resonances, itsnintimations, its reverberations. All poetry is magic. It is anspell against insensitivity, failure of imagination, ignorancenand barbarism. We may return to a masterpiece again andnagain — however familiar we may consider it to be — alwaysnfor refreshment, always to discover something new. Poemsnare not clocks. If we dismantle them, they may give nonreason at all why they tick, nor should they. For it’s a fact ofntheir existence that all genuine works of art should keepnsome of their secrets in order that they may go on giving outnwhat the Spanish poet Federico Carcia Lorca called sonidosnnegros—black sounds. These black sounds, he said, andnsaid rightly, accompany all imaginative creations whether innwords or paint, music or stone.nCiven the manner and place of my background, perhapsnit was inevitable that when I came to write I should findnmyself at work in the central traditions of verse in English.nThe set form, the lyric, the narrative poem, the ballad andnthe rest have always held a strong attraction for me. And it isnthe subject that must dictate the particular form — thendelicate and difficult choice inherent in deciding on thenarchitecture of each individual poem. Whether the finalnpiece of work is in rhyme or is in free verse, my intention hasnalways been simply to match as best I can the form with thencontent.nThe most valuable of anthologies, naturally, is the oneneach of us carries in our head. For myself, I find it difficult tonremember a poem or a fragment of a poem without thenrhythm of a line or the lifebelt of a rhyme for the drowningnmemory to hook on to. As for the rhyme itself—thatndangerous creature — it must never be, so to speak, merelynthe chime but also the exact and only word appropriate tonthe occasion: a nice problem always for the writer.nBecause I have spent most of my life virtually on the samenspot, I think it is true that I have little difficulty in identifyingnmy roots — though it was not until a seven-year absencenfollowing 1940 that it was borne in on me just how deepnthose roots are. But living for great lengths of time as part ofnthe same community presents its own difficulties. Annover-familiarity is all too prone to blur and blunt the senses.nAnd one also tends, as often as not, to look backwards inntime. But here, the last poem in my most recent collection.nnnFEBRUARY 1991/11n