When I'm sitting with others and the conversation doesn't engage my interest, I have invisible companions. Like this morning, having coffee outside in the (brief) sun. Angela said, pointing to the garden, how beautiful the lilac was. Sandra, our cleaning lady: 'Yes, lovely.' Me, silently, 'When lilacs last in the door yard bloomed...' Then Angela described how our old blind dog had fallen into a patch of rosemary, but picked herself up, wagging her tail. Me: 'There's rosemary, that's for remembrance...' Their conversation moved to how our old house was beginning to show its age; Angela said, 'Things fall apart.' Me: 'Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; / More anarchy is loosed upon the world...' I'm just smiling distantly, sipping my coffee; and the others don't know I've had momentary contact with Whitman, Shakespeare and Yeats.
I don't know if other people do this; but I'm grateful I remember so much poetry. It's an endless anthology of beauty in one's head, just like my memory of classical music or Broadway musical songs. It's an 'ever-present stay against troubles'. --NowI'll have to google that. Isn't it the Cranmer marriage service? I think so.
I've googled it, and it seems I'm wrong; there the psalm's 'An ever-present help in trouble.' Must have been thinking of that. Ah well...
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2 comments:
Yes, I hear quite often those friendly voices whispering in my ear lines of poetry I often thought I had forgotten. Then I smile to myself. It is as though a long lost friend was waving to me from the other shore of the flow of conversation and – sometimes – even winking to me in connivance !
Jo (from Belgium).
Other people do this; and other people are grateful they remember so much poetry.
When I needed a wheelbarrow, and realised I was in a neighbourhood where I could go and borrow one from my neighbour, Adrian Mitchell's 'Ten Ways to Avoid Lending Your Wheelbarrow to Anybody' was running through my head. When my neighbour opened the door, my first instinct was to ask 'Is your wheelbarrow full of blood'?
In slightly less gruesome tone, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Housman and Causley are my constant companions on my daily drive to work; something which I am deeply thankful for.
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