Suddenly Poetry

Wellbeloved Reader,

While for now this muddle of Internet may be consumed by poetry, rest assured some more interesting posts are on their way. For now, though, allow me to kindly present more poetry and apologise for the lack of posts, and the dull, recurrent nature of those few that do appear.

Between the Treetops and the Sky

Between the treetops and the sky
There rang while daytime sleepers lie
In resonent, angelic strain
“O come with me and live again”.

The church was packed with rows of four
With flowers crowding every door,
As now, at last asleep, was borne
A seeker of another dawn.

They spoke some prayer around his head
Since prayers aren’t common to the dead,
And swapped the deathbed forg’d by birth
To one of quiet nature’s earth.

The vicar spoke upon his grave
About the kind and happy knave,
And gave him back below the sod
To heaven – and – to heaven’s God.

To heaven’s God indeed! I pray
When I myself, as others, lay
Let prayer forgive the lowly bone
And favour lie beneath that stone.

And now I hope the next post shall be upon some other vane!

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1909 – 2015

Irrigated Reader,

May your seeds grow well, and may this crop of untennable blogging be pleasantly merry as I consider again the field of poetry.

Here, then, are some lacklustre lines writ upon the memory of a far better poet, who died 106 years ago today*.

Lines Writ by a Grave
June 18th 2015

Here, where poets lips do lie –
Pass and breathe a passing sigh –
For hope and life here sleep in bone
And deeds stand up in deedless stone.

Can we find where lychen clings
The mem’rys of forgotten things,
Can we count in name and date
All these dawns now lost to fate?

What truth is there we yet could know
Of truths all sundered, cast below?
And frailest, lost with ev’ry chime,
Leave here to rest that treasure – time.

Here leave indeed those thousand themes
Now passed beyond all present schemes.
These stones stood up till days will end,
In service of their long past friend.

At peace, in kind reposing form,
In summer’s evening sunlight warm,
Breath, and think, and wish, and do;
A hundred years since he did too.

_____

Also, if I have managed to post this as I had so merrily hoped Belgian Internet would let me, then Adieu, kind reader, from the far fields of Waterloo!

*Alas, Belgian Internet delivered this post two days late!

Shakespeare’s Visit to Maldon

Inquisitorial Reader!

Prepare to be amazed, bemused, and finally somewhat sceptical upon this jumble of barely reasoned words, sketching out a history of when, just perhaps, Shakespeare came to Maldon and was inspired!

William Shakespeare,  that noble playwright of the Avon, may be one of the most famous men in the world to have ever put pen to paper. His plays shaped the English language, and it is – possibly – a 400 year old trip to Maldon that inspired one of them; Cymbeline.

Cymbeline is the history of Cubobelin, king of the Catuvellauni, and he is the man who founded the city that would one day become Colchester.  Cubobelin’s town, however, was called Camulodunon – this is where Cubobelin most probably first came to power and an important part of his history lies there.

There is always the story that Shakespeare liked to visit the places he wrote about, and, as far as this ignorant blogger is aware, there is some fair evidence for that. And I await a better scholar of the man to correct me.

Now, plague was a common problem in London, often causing play houses to be shut up and meaning that acting companies would have to tour the countryside. This was one of the reasons that the King’s Men visited Maldon in the early 1600s. For sure they were there at least twice, in May 1603 and January 1604, at a time when Shakespeare worked with them, and there is no reason to doubt that Shakespeare came to the town with them at this time.

So, why Cymbeline? What has a Celtic king of Colchester got to do with Shakespeare’s visits to Maldon?

Well, thanks to a few mistaken antiquaries, in Shakespeare’s day it was Maldon that was believed to be the site of Cubobelin’s Camulodunon, and not the famous place at Colchester. This throws in an interesting possibility – Cymbeline wasn’t finished until 1611 at the latest, after Shakespeare’s visits to Maldon, and at a time when William Camden’s Britannia and Remaines Concerning Britaine were the talk of the Kingdom, important within which was the tale of Cubobelin and Maldon.

So, pleasant Reader, I pray that within such a tale as this you find some honest possibility, as I hope may be the case, that aside from merely visiting Maldon, that great playwright took such an interest in it that the town was inspired into immortality under his pen.

Adieu, dearest Reader.

Gargleyark.com

Dissenting* Reader,

As the title may suggest, I have bought a small plot of internet at gargleyark.com; while my blog will most certainly remain in its stead here, I shall (and have recently been) working hard on this new web project.

Basically, it’s a professional/personal site, where lots of odds and ends will be tied up neatly. (Plus I even wrote all the CSS myself, which I’m pretty proud of!)

While the site is still under construction, I discovered this quite awesome tutorial on how to change CSS with PHP, cool eh?

Anyway, more posts to come soon on books, I think, and also there might be an App Studio tutorial or two.

Ta-ra & Toodle pip! (What an awful ending to a blog post.)

*If you really wish, you may agree with the majority, I just like the word.

A History of Aberystwyth: Part 7

Honest Reader,

Allow me, please, to continue with the seventh part of this brief history.

The Old College

GR: This is the oldest part of the university, and was constructed in three stages; originally, this land was owned by the Price family, and in 1795 Sir Uvedale Price commissioned John Nash to construct him a house here. It stood where the tallest part of the old college stands now, which stands out in a slightly different colour stone to the rest of the college. The house that stood there was a tall gothic structure; built with a triangular plan and an octagonal tower on each corner, it was one of Nash’s earliest gothic projects, and stood as a testament to his design until 1897.

Castle House brought tourists into Aberystwyth well into the mid-nineteenth century and in 1864 a man called Thomas Savin, who was an important railway entrepreneur, bought the house and built the rest of the buildings that we see today around it. This grand Castle Hotel cost him a fortune, and just as it was nearing completion a stock market crash meant that Savin went bankrupt and was forced to sell the hotel. It was then bought by a small group of people who were trying to set up a welsh university, and that is how the university here began.

C: And what is that image on the side of the college?

GR: There are three mosaics on the end that faces the castle; the centre mosaic shows Archimedes, icon of science and learning, being presented with the two ‘modern’ exploits that made Aberystwyth what it was when the college was being built; those namely being sea trade, which had increases significantly since the previous century, and the railway, which had opened in 1864, only a year before Castle House had begun to be expanded and built around.

C: But, wait a minute, you said earlier that Castle House was knocked down in 1897, how comes the rest of the buildings of Castle Hotel are still here, and just that part has been replaced?

GR: In 1885 there was a terrible fire that destroyed a large part of the building, three men were killed and four severely wounded, as well as the library, laboratory, and museum and their contents all being destroyed. Rebuilding work was slow and by the 1890s it was decided to extend a part of the structure that had been too severely damaged to be repaired; this part was unfortunately the remnants of Castle House, which was taken down and the larger building that stands now put in its place.

C: I see, a shame for sure – I should have liked to see how Castle House looked.

GR: Well, I hope you are not too disappointed with what stands today!

C: For sure, not at all, sir.

GR: Very good to hear, so shall we wander a little further?

C: Aye, sir, gladly, carry on!