Rooks

                                                                                Cornish cottage gardens
 

 

Dear Reader,

 

A judge sentencing a neo-Nazi sympathizer this week has spared him jail as long as he spends time reading the classics.  If he reads Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare he can avoid prison.  But he will have to return to court to be tested by the judge on his reading, his progress.

But Michael Deacon in the Telegraph thinks this could be a bad decision and gave some examples.  If, for instance, this Nazi sympathizer reads Dickens's Oliver Twist he might encounter Fagin, a nakedly anti-Semitic stereotype. And if he reads Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice he will encounter another, in the form of Shylock.  He might also discover the Evelyn Waugh admired Mussolini, Ezra Pound supported Hitler, and W B Yeats approved of eugenics ("Sooner or later we must limit the families of the unintelligent classes").

There were many more examples but you have probably got the idea now.  I wrote about human behaviour in my blog a few weeks ago and would just reiterate that people are very complex and can be good and bad, kind and cruel, or anything else, in the same personality.  Indeed I am often surprised at what I think about something myself.  Alexander Pope, 1688, poet and satirist, wrote: 'know then thyself, presume not God to scan.....the proper study of mankind is Man.' I would suggest that knowing yourself is not easy, knowing someone else even more difficult.

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 From S.T.Coleridge, 1800 in Grasmere, Westmorland

'The beards of thistle and dandelions flying above the lonely mountains like life, and I saw them thro' the trees skimming the lake like swallows.'

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Rooks

I was fourteen
when I first heard
the call of the rooks
caw-cawing
their eerie cries.

From a Cornish cottage garden
I walked down through
dark woods to the beach,
a remote place,
just dunes, sand, the sea
and me, a confused, angry teenager,
with the rooks caw-cawing in my ears
disturbing my thoughts.

Even now, in later years,
whenever I hear whispers from the wind,
or sea lapping over large grey stones
ever forward, ever backward,
glimpse a faraway horizon
and see twilight descending
darkening the sky,
the rooks in large black groups
flying high towards
their evening bed
cawing, cawing, cawing
my heart misses a beat
and an unexplained sadness
overcomes me.

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With very best wishes, Patricia