Keats-Shelley and Young Romantics Prize Winners

Conscientious Objector

loud is how a dog doesn’t like his life

in that land of hollering, a husband

and his wife. where as a puppy,

smartest son of a smart litter, he loved

them long but by now has spent

himself, so there’s nothing to be done

except ask to go out once the woman

shoves the man so hard against the wall

at the top of the stairs that it cracks

and he barks, but no one wonders

whether he is okay. the woman has

family four streets away, safe with

no shouting and when the man slams

the door to get a drink from his stash in

the shed the dog makes sure he is on

the other side of it. later at 3 a.m. when

the woman walks barefoot a mile

through the streets in her threadbare

nightdress to stand in the moonlit

driveway of his new home and call him

to come he sees her, he hears her,

but it’s too late to want that now. He’s

already another world. though

he’ll keep the same name.

Laurinda Lind

Philosophic numbers smooth

Tara Lee

Storm

Day one:

Over the crust of the world
The storm hums
And rolls thickly,
Considers bursting free.

Day two:

It hollows away the light,
Saturates the air.
Our bulbs bleed softly against it.

Day three:

The rain finally erupts,
And I feel the suck of gravity.
It rattles on leaves, umbrellas,
Glosses over the pavements.

This water swells in every street,
Breaks the land apart, quietly.
It has the soft colors of something gentle.
Smearing it all dull brown.

Allegra Mullan

Of Liberty and Revolutions

Mine Kovavisarach

Giant

Cahal Dallat

Keats and Consumption

Hester Styles Vickery

The Step of Two

Tallulah Lefkowitz

Guilt in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Daniel L. Shailer

Driving to Work at 5am listening to Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

I peer outside then flinch from the headlights’ glare,

a movement not dissimilar to the quirks and winces

of Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu the Vampyre,

a role he must have relished with his long skull face,

talon hands, that silent movie leer – which makes

me think how I have missed my true vocation:

that, far from another day of filing and taking

an interest in the colleagues’ children, I could be

waking in a crypt or creeping up some stairs

for audiences to marvel at my hunched shadow,

the believable way I shunned the dawn –

not once overdoing the recoil with a cat-like hiss,

but always maintaining the realism

of a much maligned and misunderstood bat

resigned to the eternity of that hollow, frozen stare.

Will Kemp

A Distant Idea of Proximity: How Keats handled Beauty

Michael Allen

Sonnet after Frankenstein

Wreathed in laurels; glossy leaves unfurl, coiled,

The great pale gloaming thing unravels limbs,

Grins, hitches weeping gums wide, growling hymns,

Praising Father, Master, he who slaved, toiled

To build this monstrous structure - he is soiled

With these grimly yellowed stains, he who brims

With boundless love and wonder - awed, he skims

Round flat stones through his father’s

throat - unspoiled.

The night, a temptress, plucks his peeling heart,

Wet, from his dappled chest, as moonlight blinds

Him; stumbling, mismatched, made up of spare parts

And engine oil. He trips, and falls. He finds

Great pale gloaming blooms that feed on the moon:

He wakens not, with frail blossoms strewn.

Riona Miller

The Stuff that Romantic Dreams are made Of

We all dream. We dream when we sleep, but also when we are awake; the humdrum of reality has us transporting ourselves to fantastical realms. This whimsical dreamland of ours is very important to us as human beings. It serves as an escape from our everyday lives. Dreams, whether those that manifest in our slumber or in our state of boredom at our desks, are our getaways. But they seemed to be more than just that to the Romantics.

Could it be that dreams fuelled the greatest literary works produced in the Romantic era? After all, it is widely-known that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein after having a dream about the creation of a new man by a scientist with the hubris to play God. If we look at the other Romantic greats, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and Lord Byron, we will find that dreams had a big part to play in their works as well. These Romantics took to heart and fully explored Shakespeare’s notion that “we are such stuff dreams are made on”. What exactly did dreams mean to them?

Many critics contend that the Romantic movement rose as a backlash to the reason, logic and science-ridden Age of Enlightenment. Romantics believed that the advances and developments in science were creating a conformist society that made no room for dreams and human imagination. The Romantics protested against science and rationality and fought for freedom of expression and the love of nature. In this fight, dreams, nightmares and visions played a huge part. They were extremely important to the great Romantic poets and writers, as it was believed that dreams were the core of the human spirit and creative mind; everything that science and logic of the Enlightenment Age was not. Yet, the Romantics’ obsession and fascination with dreams have quite possibly led to some answers to one of science’s biggest questions: ‘Why do we dream?’

One of the leaders of the Romantic Movement, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is known for his extensive exploration of dreams and nightmares in his works. In his early life, Coleridge was plagued by vivid and terrible nightmares that became worse following his opium addiction. They served as inspiration for many of his poems, including “The Pains of Sleep”, “Dejection: An Ode” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Coleridge was in love with Sara Hutchinson while married to another woman. In the 1802 poem “Dejection: An Ode”, Coleridge describes a waking nightmare. He declares that he feels only a “dull pain”, “a grief without a pang”—a persistent deadening of all his emotions. In the poem, Coleridge refers to a certain lady as being “pure of heart”. He asserts that she is already aware of the light and music that encompasses her soul, which is Joy. Joy, he says, gives us “a new Earth and new Heaven, / Undreamt of by the sensual and the proud”.

This could all point to the first answer to the question of why we dream: we dream to heal. Some researchers have theorized that we dream to take the edge off painful experiences and memories so we can heal psychologically. While we may not know if Coleridge ever lost interest in Sara Hutchinson, we might speculate that he managed to go through a healing process by having dreams about her. Dreaming can help take mental stress off events that traumatise, hurt or deeply affect an individual. We can clearly see that Coleridge is hurting, but at the same time, trying to see the bright side of his pain. And he does so by transforming his emotions negativity and agony into love.

Calling the lady the “devoutest friend of (his) choice”, Coleridge hopes she will awake from “gentle sleep” with a “light heart”, and that she may “ever, evermore rejoice”. Since this poem was inspired by a dream or nightmare of his, Coleridge could have put it to paper as part of a healing process. He explores many emotions throughout this poem, ostensibly to enhance his ability to cope with and control his troubled feelings and stress over the matter.

We dream to heal.

Another Romantic legend, Lord Byron, explores the power of dreams in his poem, aptly titled “The Dream”, written in 1816. In it, Byron questions the nature of dreams : “The dread of vanished shadows - Are they so?/Is not the past all shadow? - What are they?/Creations of the mind.” He starts his poem with a stanza discussing the psychology of dreams. This is followed by nine stanzas which appear to be successive stages of Byron’s dream.

According to Byron, dreams belong to the realm of reality and they “have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.” He wonders whether these images are “heralds”, “spirits”, or “sibyls”: Dreams are indeed like highly-condensed heralds and sibyls from our deepest unconscious, but once decoded, they can summon our deepest, darkest desires that shape our past, present and future. Byron fully realizes the power of dreams: “They have power-the tyranny of pleasure and pain-what they will, and shake us with the vision that’s gone by.”

The second and third stanzas of the poem detail Byron’s passion for his boyhood love, Mary Chaworth. The recounts are vividly expressed, and he fondly calls her the “Lady of his love” with her “beloved face” shining on him. This stanza is full of unbridled romantic words of love for her.

In the sixth stanza, Byron speaks of his marriage: his bride "gentle" and "fair", but not the "one beloved"; not the one who “made the Starlight of his Boyhood”. This refers to his marriage to Annabella Millbanke, which crumbled. Byron conveys what he felt at the altar, and it is clear that he deeply yearned for the “Lady of his Love”. In the last stanza, Byron describes his dream as “almost like a reality - the one to end in madness - both in misery”. This poem is a recount of Byron’s dream, and it follows him through a journey of many memories and events.

Byron writes: a dream is a “slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.” Dreams are condensed mental images of all our innermost memories locked away in our subconscious. Dreams have the power to eat away at us because they bring up parts of our life that we no longer thought we still had with us. Byron vividly demonstrates that he can still feel the emotions from his youth, and it almost seems like reality to him.

We dream to remember.

Mary Shelley famously wrote Frankenstein after having a dream about the events that unfolded in the story. However, what about the dreams that actually occur in the story itself?

In Frankenstein, there are at least two levels of a dream, or dream-like vision experienced by the titular Victor Frankenstein. The first, which is given a dream-like quality by his insistence that it is not "the vision of a madman" (Shelley 47), is his hopeful daydream of what his scientific creation of another human being would mean.
Victor refers to this vision he has, along with his hope that his creation might be "beautiful," when he later laments, on actually witnessing it come to life, that "the beauty of the dream vanished" to be replaced by "horror and disgust" at a "wretch" more "hideous" than a "mummy again endued with animation" (Shelley 52-53).

Victor’s second dream takes a much darker turn. He rushes from his laboratory after recoiling in disgust at the creature and tries to escape his problems by focussing his thoughts on his fiance, Elizabeth.

This horrifying nightmare that Victor experiences raises many questions and theories. There are Freudian critics who have said that this Victor’s nightmare of digging up body-parts in Mother Earth is rooted in an unconscious desire for a reunion with the body of his deceased mother. Is this nightmare a representation of Victor’s real urges and deep desires? He could have been pointing us to the third answer to our question: we dream to fulfill our most profound wishes.

In the early 1900’s, Sigmund Freud proposed that our dreams have symbolic meanings that relate to the fulfilling of our subconscious wishes and desires. Freud theorized that everything that we remember from a dream after waking up is an indication of what we unconsciously desire to do or accomplish. In our dreams, these thoughts and urges are at their most primitive, hence the vivid and horrifying nature of some of our nightmares. Victor could have been subconsciously revealing and unearthing his deepest urges and wishes.

We dream to fulfill our deepest desires.

One poem, written by John Keats, encapsulates all three reasons for why we dream: La Belle Dame Sans Merci. It tells of a knight’s obsession with a lady he saw “in the meads”. We find out that the knight is on the verge of death. The lady’s romantic gestures “lulled (him) to sleep” and he “dream’d” the “latest dream he’d ever dream’d”. In this dream, the knight is transported into some kind of hell where he sees the lady’s previous victims, “pale kings and princes” who warn him of the dangerous woman.

Like Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode”, “La Belle Dame” also conveys the message that we dream to heal. In reality, Keats was in love with his neighbour, Fanny Brawne, while he was stricken with tuberculosis and on the brink of death. The knight in the poem is enchanted by a beautiful seductress who traps him and causes him to fall into a coma-like slumber. Keats’ choice to portray the knight’s downfall in this way could be, like Coleridge, a way to heal and cope with his own feelings.

Keats’ feelings of love for the woman are clearly expressed in the way he describes her: “full beautiful - a faery’s child”. He then describes the romantic gestures he carried out for her, including making a “garland for her head”. This strikes a similarity with Byron’s “The Dream”, in which the persona recounts romantic memories with a beautiful lady he is passionate about.

Above all, the dominant theme in “La Belle Dame” is the extent to which the knight is entrapped by the woman. The knight’s nightmare of hell is a Keats’ representation of the consequence of ungoverned emotion and perilous obsession. Much like how the knight was enraptured with the beautiful lady, we sometimes have such a strong desire for certain things that they appear to us almost frighteningly in our dreams, emerging from our subconscious. Reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein, these subjugated and repressed emotions could ultimately be the death of the individual or his salvation. “La Belle Dame” showcases the power of dreams and their influence on the leading literary minds of the Romantic era.

Dreams were an integral part of the works and lives of the Romantics - some were deeply affected by them in real life and put them into the form of literature to ease emotional distress, while others saw them as inspiration for new ideas. Regardless, they have taught us many things about our subconscious mind. Our dreams serve a much greater purpose than just to put on a show for us to enjoy while we sleep. They present to us memories, images and the deepest and darkest thoughts we unknowingly keep. They have a power over us that the Romantics used to fuel their creative process, no matter how much pain and confusion they felt.

It is fair to say that our dreams represent who we are. The Romantics were fascinated by the human spirit and individual personality, and I believe they found both very much alive in dreams. Everything about a person can be told from what he or she dreams, and how a dream makes he or she feel.

Why do we dream? We dream because dreams, as Byron writes, “ . . . do divide our being; they become a portion of ourselves as of our time”.

SOURCES

George Gordon Byron. The Dream. 1816. Print.

John Keats. La Belle Dame Sans Merci. 1819. Print.

Lisa LaBracio. "Why Do We Dream? 7 Theories from Science (in TED-Ed GIFs)." TEDEd Blog. 25 Jan. 2016. Web. Accessed 26 Jan. 2016.

Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. 1818. Print.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Dejection: An Ode. 1802. Print.

William Shakespeare. The Tempest. 1611. Print.

Sofia Amanda Bening

Presence

darker, I say. night knits the moon's eye shut.
quiet, I say. the birds swallow their songs.

apples fall at my touch. the moths unfurl
and soar into the flame. it's good, I say.

it's healthy. stop it now. a child poised
at the edge of the lake. each star collapsed

into evening. go back, I say. go back
to the beginning. the trees rewreathe themselves

in amber. amber succumbs to green, as calm
to fever. returning is a slow affair.

each berry regathered, back to before
the birth of Christ. bring her here, I say.

the earth draws back, and there she is. petal cleaves
to bone. bring her back, I say, louder.

she blinks twice. her hands open to accept
the rain. I turn away, for now she can hear

me breathing. they seal her in. back home
I wear flowers in my hair, faintly slick

with oil. die for me, I say, and they listen.

Daniella Cugini

How did Revolutions in Politics Affect the Poetic Revolution in ‘Lyrical Ballads?’

Stephen Horvath

Leaving Home (short story)

‘A man’s house is like his baby,’ my father would exclaim, whenever I talked about moving out. ‘If you don’t take care of it, it will die. You can’t even take care of yourself, son. How are you going to manage a house?’

He would always present this question in a condescending tone, as though he were trying to delay my growing up. Not once had he asked me to get a job, or what I wanted to do with my life. All he had ever asked of me was not to throw away my life like he had. He wanted me to do something worthwhile: become a doctor; take the teaching route or discover a new element. He had a good sense of humour; he knew I wasn’t into science or anything academic. I was only taking a course on sociology at university because, well, my best friend was. To be honest, I didn’t know where my life was going. I had nothing planned. I travelled with senseless optimism.

For a week now I had been packing and unpacking, and then packing again. I didn’t know what I needed for my new life. Should I take a spare towel? Or another pair of shoes? There was only a finite amount of space in my two large suitcases. I would usually ask my dad to decide for me; he always knew best. But this time he didn’t help.

‘I don’t know. What do you think?’ He answered all my questions with more questions.

He’d being doing that more frequently the past weeks. I couldn’t tell if he was questioning what I was doing, or trying to teach me something.

I took the shoes.

It was finally the Friday, the day of departure. There were dirty plates on the kitchen counter from the previous night. We had ordered Chinese from our local restaurant; it was the last hoora with my dad. At ten in the morning the cab arrived and honked so we would acknowledge its existence. As I dragged my suitcases behind me, sliding my way to the cab, the driver looked at me, emotionless and cold. This was Esteban, his usual look. In a month it will be fourteen years since we met Esteban. He’s been married for ten years, and witnessed the miracle of birth in his cab, twice. But I have never seen him smile.

I loaded my suitcases into the trunk of the black cab. Dad stood next to me, offering words of encouragement as I struggled to lift the suitcases. After a little pushing the trunk door finally closed and I saw him. Tears in his eyes like a reservoir in monsoon, water filled to its banks. I hugged him until his eyes flooded.

The ride gave me time to contemplate. To reflect on what had just happened. A man with the heart of a lion, a poster boy for what I understood manliness to mean… crying. This was something I had not seen for fifteen years.

The last time he cried was when I was four, in our house. Mum wanted to spend her last remaining days with Dad, Gavin and me. Holding the hand of my mother, my father wept. Gavin was at school and I was sitting next to him as tears rolled down his cheeks, and spit forced its way volcanically out of his mouth. The ECG wasn’t making a beeping sound; the line was motionless. I was too young to understand what that meant. I didn’t understand what anything meant then: why he was crying, or why she was sleeping so still. Nothing at all.

In 1999, two years after she passed away, my older brother was gunned down by a local policeman. He shot him point blank as Gavin tried pulling out his wallet. Gavin had gone out to get beer for Dad and his friends from work.

We lost a lot living here. There were a lot of memories in that house, the one he calls his home. I was ready to let go, but Dad wasn’t. He wanted Mum to come back, to call Gavin home from the shops. He didn’t want to lose the dog in the park, or over-feed the goldfish. He didn’t want to let go of me. But I did.

It was ten thirty-five; if I were to get there on time I had to leave. He let go and I looked away immediately. I couldn’t continue with anymore eye contact or I would begin to regret my decision.

The suitcases were loaded and Esteban and I were in the cab. Last looks between dad and Esteban were exchanged, and then he turned to me. ‘Come say hi sometimes.’ I nodded without thinking and hated myself for it. I could have at least said goodbye, or given him another smile. But I didn’t.

And then we were off. I could feel his stare burrowing holes in the back of my head. Yet I chose to ignore them. I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t even smile.

Parth Vaghani

Tom’s Pouch of Cure Stones

When Tom was still alive I would often see him

looking up to the sky while standing out in the field

at the back of his farmhouse – and when I had the chance

to ask him, one day in the local, what he was looking at,

Tom took a black felt pouch out from his pocket

and handed it to me. They fell from the sky, he said, cure-stones,

for curing elf-shot in cows, when the cow starts to pine away

for no reason – hit by the fairies, the old folk say. As I clutched

the clutch of hidden stones and went to untie the pouch's lace,

he told me that the pouch must never be opened

nor can the stones ever be looked upon or counted.

The pouch of cure-stones was given to him by his father

as were the words of the cure, he said, as I turned

the concealed cure-stones within the palm of my hand.

The stones were round and smooth, the size of marbles – blind eyes

kept in the dark from where they see into the sickness of the cow.

The pouch is passed over the cow's back, in the sign of the cross,

Tom explained, while reaching his blue-veined hand out to bless

the air – and I imagined him at the afflicted animal's side

caressing the top of its head with one hand, the other hand

blessing the pouch over its back, the Braille of stones praying in

through the animal's hide as Tom whispers the words of the cure

into the felt conch of the cow's ear, an incanted bovine language

handed down from the wind that blows the slow dreams of trees

into the ghost-birds who haunt the fallen autumn leaves.

When I suggested to Tom that the stones may have been coughed up

from the smoothing gall of a seagull's bladder whilst flying high overhead,

he just smiled, as the wise are known to do when mocked by the foolish

and when I gave Tom his pouch of cure-stones back, he returned it to his pocket

and stood to go. The stones were needed, he said, by a neighbour's cow.

Although Tom passed away many years ago, I've heard some people still see him,

standing out there in the middle of the same field at the back of his now derelict,

roofless farmhouse, looking up at the sky, they say,

while quickly raising his right hand up above his head.

I just smile, when people wonder

at what he might be doing, as I know that Tom

must have finally untied the lace on his pouch

and, one by one, he is throwing

his clutch of ghost-stones

back up into the sky.

Paul McMahon

The Romantic Dante

Harry Cochrane

Madra

The dog who read books had nowhere
in his brain for the words to go.

As they streamed in through his eyes, line
by line they re-emerged through each

fibre in his fur with a yelp.
He watched his master’s noiseless act

of reading and copied him as
best he could turning the pages

by swishing his nose, swivelling
his head from side to side and top

to bottom over each page. Words
of English left him a shiny,

glistening coat but Irish words left
him with the most peculiar

smell, attracting the barks in par-
ticular of wolfhounds and red

setters, water spaniels, Kerry
Blues, and the keening of priests who

prayed only in hidden ditches
near forgotten limestone mass rocks.

Patrick Cotter

The Shelleys in Ireland: passion masquerading as insight?

Eleanor Fitzsimons

Terrier in rape

At the beginning of our universe

when it was still an unhedged acre,

light filled its horizon like clotted cream

so you could scoop it up with a spoon,

and if God saw it, all God saw was light.

Our dog sees oil-seed rape in shades of grey,

but his nose, that can smell a molecule

of rat sweat blown across a county, is dazzled;

this no-man's-land of honey-mustard gas

is like being at the big bang for a dog.

There are rabbits in this universe of rape

whose thought of dog is only bark-bark-bark

so scattered by the packed diffraction grating

of spiny stems that expert ears can't localise

dog as dog in panic-blur of dog threat.

At the stile's Copernican vantage point

we see dog as disturbance in rape-shimmer,

a cosmic ray track in a bubble chamber,

his friendly furry willingness reduced

to appearance of appearance on our retinas.

Nearly got it now: the rape flowers

are gold dust on gravitation field lines

showing the contours of this dog-warped

space-time like iron filings round a magnet,

a universe unbounded if you're in it.

Except that just beyond the edge of vision

you almost see the rape field broadcasting

its ultraviolet reality to insects

who are true viewers and know this gold is purple.

A dog turns up, happy and rabbitless.

Nick MacKinnon

Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Explorers: James Cook, James King and a Sledge in Kamchatka

Ruth Scobie

Lord Leighton Brings Arabia to Holland Park (with extracts from journals at Leighton House)

Is there any wonder that from

many thousands and eighty four tiles

hand-picked and packed in Damascus

almost two hundred years ago

then shipped three thousand miles

from Syria and Persia, mostly Arabia

in their gold and peacock splendour,

(their gorgeousness and sumptuosity

pooled in shapes of sailing boats

and mermaids, long-necked vases,

long-necked cranes, long-necked serpents

coiled next to leaping hares and lions couchant

or lions with copper-lustre eyes, lop-sided grins,

with roars enough to sway swanky trees

shaped like single leaves), including tiles

with shameless flowers glowing in lapis glaze

hanging globed petal heads,

and hexagonal tiles with plucked lyres

setting ornamental music free

with the last intense blue notes

from slit throats of parakeets,

that on arriving here in Kensington

to grace Lord Leighton’s ‘jewel box’,

his Arab Hall, overlooked by

Athlete Wrestling With a Python, work by Watts

and Burne-Jones, Millais’s Shelling Peas,

that the young William de Morgan,

assigned to install the tiles’ original narratives

below the glorious Iznik dome, (although

he had never seen them before) made

innumerable (and inebriate) misconstructions

so that peacocks hung from clouds

while mermaids swam past them,

roots of trees climbed skyward,

a fountain filled its eyes with tears,

fish swam belly up around an inverse sun,

plants bamboozled themselves

winding down to the mosaic floor

with its wayward flow and ripple,

and R. Browning (an eloquent guest)

laughed so much he spilt his ink

then couldn’t finish his pudding.

Pat Borthwick

Natura Naturata: Shelley’s Philosophy of the Mind in Creation

Priyanka Soni

The Present

I shove up through the old plantation – larch

out of season, drab, drained of all greenness,

widowed princesses in moth-eaten furs –

and stumble out on the lap of the moor.

Rotten and rusted, a five-bar gate

lies felled in the mud, letting the fields escape.

Winter is late and light this year, thin snow

half puddled, sun still trapped in the earth,

sludge underfoot all the way to the ridge.

And none of the stuff that I came here to find,

except in a high nick at the valley head

where a wet, north-facing lintel of rock

has cornered and cupped enough of the wind

for running water to freeze. Icicles:

once, I un-rooted some six-foot tusk

from the waterfall’s crystallised overhang,

lowered it down and stood it on end, then stared

at an ice-age locked in its glassy depths,

at far hills bottled in its weird lens.

These are brittle and timid and rare, and weep

in my gloved fist as I ferry them home.

I’d wanted to offer my daughter

a taste of the glacier, a sense of the world

being pinned in place by a diamond-like cold

at each pole. But opening up my hand

there’s nothing to pass on, nothing to hold.

Simon Armitage

Wings of Poesy: Keats’s Birds

Andrew Lacey

The Small Boy and the Mouse

When he dosed his eyes and asked the question,

he saw an egg, a boiled egg, lodged

above his heart. The shell had been broken off,

with a teaspoon he supposed, it was pure curd white

and still warm. Inside -he could see inside -

there was a garden with rows of potatoes,

sweet peas in a tangle, and a few tomatoes, red

and green ones, along with that funny sulphur smell

coming from split sacks. There was an e d bathtub

in the garden, with chipped edges, a brown puddle

staining around itself, and a few wet leaves.

He could see down the plughole, so the sun must have shone,

and he heard his father digging potatoes,

knocking off the soil, and his mother fetching the washing in because the sky promised a shower. There was a hole

or rather a pipe under the tub, where the water went,

and down at the bottom was a mouse -its ribs were poking out,

its damp fur clung together. The mouse was holding

a black-and-white photograph of a boy

who might have been three or four years old;

the boy was playing with boxes, or were they saucepans

from the kitchen? -he was leaning forward and slightly blurred. And what was strange about the picture,

apart from being held by a mouse who sat on his haunches

and gripped it in his forepaws, was that the space

around the boy, the paleness around him, expanded,

got very bright and engulfed the mouse, the bathtub, the garden, and the egg with its shell cracked off.

After that there was nothing, apart from the dark

inside the boy's head and a kind of quiet

he'd never had before. He opened his eyes. All the furniture looked strange, as if someone had rearranged it.

D.H. Maitreyabandhu

This Living Hand: Commonplacing Keats

Jillian Hess

Lost

“Some things are truly lost…” (Richard Wilbur, The Mind Reader)

That Summer we were lost to the whole world

but our open-air, camp-fire selves. An orchard

fruited with early damsons, and the fields

were cram-full of potatoes, so it was easy

to live off the land and to supplement

our stolen pickings with rabbits or fish

from the unsupervised backwaters. Hours on end

we lay on the ledgering bank, our lines low,

while in deep pools where the current circled

bream nudged and tormented us; hours on end

we tended our traps by the burrow holes

and runs in the meadow grass, then as dusk came

made fire with birch twigs to cook what we had caught

and what we had gathered. We watched the late glow

of the embers until cold stiffened our backs,

then wrapped ourselves in our small tent, and slept.

Between times, we exercised, daydreamed, read,

wrote verses. We made spears from brushwood staves,

and hurled them great distances, read Sophocles,

Hopkins, Jung, wrote philosophical lines

from the collective unconscious, eulogies

of the dappled woods, elegies for felled trees.

Or we lay in the sun, and I did not share thoughts

of a girl that might come riding from somewhere

on a motorbike stolen from helmeted bad boys,

my skinny scarecrow straight out of Baudelaire

lit with cheap rings, and a crown of crow’s feathers

tight round her naked brows. The river was cold

where we swam after hunting, the bed’s silt soft

and dark underfoot. On the surface, at eye level,

flies danced, circled, drowned in pools of despair.

I had a knife at that time with an eight-inch blade

that curved and then came to a point. The handle

was moulded to fit the palm, and a cross-piece

kept fingers and thumb protected. The knife slept

at my hip in a sheath held safe by a press-stud

looping over the cross-piece, but all day I used it.

The handle stunned fish, the blade sharpened spears,

fencing stakes, pencils, cut string, tyrant knots, withies.

Its point speared food from the fire, from the pans,

the flat of the blade carried flesh, fruit and tubers

to my mouth, past the edge of my hunger. I could send

the knife flying in cartwheels, bury the point

chest-high in a beech board at ten yard, or throw it

time after time, no more than a blade’s length outside

your stretched foot, until you could stretch no further.

Home from work, forty years later, I search my house

for the knife as I search my mind for the old days.

It’s not in the loft, garage, or cellar, not among

boxes of old manuscripts, wardrobes of old clothes.

If I look for ever, I know I won’t find it.

John Gohorry

Hellenic and Scientific Influences in P.B. Shelley’s Medusa

Susan Miller

Elisions

The firm of Boulton and Watt sent 132 engines to the Caribbean between 1803 and 1830

Since you ask how
it begins, it begins
with elasticity

of steam, with sun
and planet gearing,
wax and resinous

bodies. It continues
with inequality
of pressure, with want

of wind and water.
It’s put to work by the fly-
ball governors, Gale

and Long, and the am-
iable Pennant. I am
a man of sector and rack,

quadrant glass; I
calculate the economy
of heat. No, not

of planter class myself.
Look, these
latest drawings regulate

the speed of an engine,
describe the action
of vapour. Here, the descent

in the cylinder, and,
figure c, the condensate
and vacuum – and here,

here we find the endless
reservoirs. Each night,
this dream of dark

bodies. My valves move
by gears very similar
to Smeaton’s.

Richard Marggraf Turley

Ye Elemental Genii

Adam Gyngell

The Experiment

mi dear sis

why don’t you answer my texts
your phone is always busy

i wish you would come & visit and
make up for time i lose
the People trust me. i am Their friend
i check the guinea pigs. if you flip them on their backs
they can’t move. rigid legs, helpless eyes…black
that i poke
left, right
left, right,
left, right
they don’t have names; only numbers;
gp001 forward slash rc, or gp001/etc but
i snuck a name to my favourite
I call him gp, simply the genius pig, he is much clever than us.
you will like him

don’t worry about me poking needles in my eyes
i stopped doing that
light is white &
light needs tears, remember
when we were small and held mum’s hand
she bent the rainbow’s
colours to a raggy uniform
if i gouge a finger in my eye and press
i can see that rainbow
even if it hasn’t rained
and the sun is sad behind a cloud.

bring some apples when you come
i tossed one in a pond today
and watched the ripples;
when they reached the bank
they came back
but they didn’t bump into each other
they disappeared
like you

They said I drowned a cat last Monday
the People were quiet
but didn’t blame me
i can’t remember if the cat made ripples
but I saw your face, your waving hand
you blew a kiss and then were gone

leaving me shivering, scared, a tiny ball
everyone is a giant, one day I’ll stand on Their shoulders
and see you above the tall puine trees
and smile and say I miss you

come soon,

ur little sis

Martin McRitchie

Magnificent Mutilations

Alison Pearce

Speaking in Tongues

Are you sure, Fiona asks, you’re not a priest? Ten minutes left
before her next, and she lies on her back, knees bent up, her red hair
fanned across the lilac sheet, dabbing her chest with a wet wipe.
I pour her a warm coke. Outside it's eighty-eight degrees; inside,
the fan grinds back and forth. From one wall come the usual sounds,

from the other, Caprice, ten hours into a twelve hour shift, saying,
trust me, it happens all the time. Have it your way, Fiona says,
I’ve been around too long. They come in here around Lent,
the young ones, before they take their vows. And then I see them after.

Two pigeons flurry at the skylight, fall exhausted and Caprice
is trying again when Fiona says, You know this place was haunted?
Lights coming on and off, ashtrays flying round. All that stuff. Bloody
punter, of course. Dead and nowhere better to hang around than here
the bastard. Didn’t bother me. I says, if you can move plates about,
why don’t you do the bloody washing up? But the wee girlies
were getting frightened. Voices. Touching their hair. And then it’s bad

for business. So there’s this one guy - one of my regulars. I had a feeling
about him. I didn’t ask, cause then it makes it awkward. I just says
to him, I’ve got this problem. Now could you maybe do something,
just as a favour ? Looks that damn surprised, I tell you.
Then all serious, he says I’ll need to be alone, Fiona.
She passes me some tissue, sips her coke, and I see

him standing in this room, naked, his right hand lifted, quartering
the air. His breath slowing, the pulse of the fan, the cars outside, all
slowing, beginning the Liturgy of Deliverance and as he speaks
something growing present, clawing at his nerves, a burden in the air
an outline at the edge of vision, the muscles in his neck
tensing, sweat glistening on his temples, running in the hollow
of his spine and then, unasked, his throat convulsing saliva

flooding in his mouth and breaking in the room the tongue
of angels, harsh with the arid rhythms of the desert
the air opening to his words the way that eggshell opens for a bird
or snake. His palms scorching and all this, the bed,
the table with its folded towels, the plate of Durex, Asda talc, blazing
holy, their colours scalding, the light of every thing awoken, and then the peace

of nothing, the carpet, walls, fading to dullness, and him standing
here, the air chilling on his skin, the damp prints of his feet, his hair
matted, limp, and outside the shrill summons
of the pelican lights on Dundas street.

Right enough, Fiona says, he did the job. Not that I’m religious -
Christmas and weddings, me. But I could tell, he’d cleared it out.
I owe you, I says to him and then he says to me Fiona, you realise,
he says, I’m really sorry, hen. I can’t come back here now

Edmund Cusick

Prometheus Unbound

David Taylor

Soul with White Wings

Evening, a sulphurous sky,
an unnatural quiet,
Puffsan, the cat, crouched
in the dark corner under the table.
No birds flying.

We were being warned.

Late evening it arrived.
Small havoc in the old district to the north,
a different quiet, uneasy, apprehensive,
an after-shock or two,
a scatter of shingles and further off
a ringing, not of bells but of metal.

It was over: a middling quake – 5.2.

Dawn and I find a pale moth
on the screen door. It is the soul
of Mrs Mori two floors below.
I do not know that yet
and ask the moth to go, leave, fly home
before the rising sun should confuse
or injure it. Motes rise, the fragile
alabaster wings quiver on the mesh.

At eight o’clock Mrs Mori, courteous
and calm comes to reclaim her soul,
eight being a polite and acceptable time.

Isabel Lusted

Stadial Theory, Robertson’s History of America, and Hyperion

Porscha Fermanis

Bearings

‘and for your sake

Am I this patient log-man.’

The Tempest

Log-woman that is, carrying the damp wood

In from the cold, quiet February garden,

Feeling the wind bite. It’s been long months

Since I was here and you have changed. I see

This – or sense it, for you are treating me

With care – in the difference at the door

As I arrive. How gathered and harboured

I have always been by you, and now

I see or sense you gather in yourself,

Forbearing in the current pulling us

Together as it always has. I know

I am cut loose, adrift. You cook a stew

We eat beside the fire that’s eating logs

As fast as I can bring them in it seems.

The cats unfold themselves to sniff my scarf,

As a stranger’s scent, and it’s true, I’m stranger

Here than I knew, and, darling, you are kinder

Than the wind outside, and more remote beside

Your fire than winter planets looking on

As I discover there’s nothing I can do

But bring more logs before I go, and so I do.

Leonie Rushforth

Shelley, the United Irishman and the Illuminati

Stephen Burley

The Night Tree

Secondly there are the beams or sales

sometimes called petals or branches

which on account of their reaching out

through all the timetables of dark

we are forever working to maintain

and which passing vessels have likened

to the after-death appearances of saints

or the ashes of great seafarers set up

as a beacon at the gate of a new land

where like a mermaid a ship

would be almost certain to founder.

Next there is ourselves, each man

on his watch for the deception of fog

or the shudder of the tower,

each in his turn keeping awake

for the sake of the light by his reading

of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, our one book

relayed on the stairs between watches

or else in the pinning of moths flattened

like leaves in the lantern, whose wings

like a searchlight come sweeping our walls

later, finding each of us out in our beds.

But first as I say there is the sea

which is a forest, our blades

cutting through like a photograph,

travellers caught frozen, a sequence

of light and dark pathways, hourglasses,

rain, where time travels even more slowly

as if at great height or in exile and men

report voices heard crying in darkness,

though for myself I think it is only the seals

calling to each other in their language

through all the leafiness of the night.

Jane Draycott

Doubting the Mountain: an Approach to Mont Blanc

Joe Francis

The Nightingale Broadcasts

Beatrice Harrison, who lived in a remote house in woodland

south of Oxted, Surrey, was a distinguished cellist.

She was thirty-one when she tried to persuade Lord Reith to sanction

the BBC’s recording, to be broadcast live, of a tryst

she was planning in her garden, with nightingales

in a copse, accompanied by herself on the cello

playing Elgar, whose favourite soloist she was ñ if it happened,

this would be the first ever live outdoor radio

broadcast. In May 1923, on a bench in a sea of bluebells,

she’d been playing ëChant Hindouí by Rimsky-Korsakov

when a nightingale had swollen into song ëin thirds,

and always in tune with her, from deep in a nearby grove.

It was the following spring, while making her broadcasting debut

as soloist in Elgar’s concerto with Elgar

conducting, that she’d first hit upon the idea of nightingales singing

for the nation. Lord Reith supposed they’d be real prima

donnas ñ costly and unpredictable ñ and was also chary

of packaging nature, of making birdsong ësecond-handí.

But Miss Harrison pleaded the case of the poor ñ all those

Without motorcars, in cities and the north of England.

A rehearsal went well. The broadcast, planned for 19th May,

would interrupt the Savoy Orpheans’ Saturday night dance

music programme just as the Oxted nightingales started

their evening crescendo. What a performance! ñ

the summerhouse filled with amplifiers, engineers swarming

in the undergrowth. Miss Harrison played in a ditch ñ

Elgar, Dvorak, ëDanny Boyí. Silence. Then, fifteen minutes before

the station went off the air, a nightingale cadenza, which

gargled and trilled from the oak leaves, flowered through

a million radios and crystal sets, some of them outdoors,

themselves setting off nightingales, or building in the night air

a city of song in alien habitats ñ cornfields, moors,

mountains, housing. For twelve years the BBC broadcast

Miss Harrington’s nightingale concerts (one of them, set up near

a pond, featuring a chorus of frogs). After she moved house,

the birds were recorded solo, not every year

but certainly in 1942, when engineers captured a nightingale

outsung but not silenced by a fleet of Lancasters

droning overhead, the first of the ëthousand bomberí raids,

targeting Cologne, archived though never broadcast.

The RAF had discovered that two out of three bombs dropped

in night raids on Germany had missed their aim

by more than five miles. Area bombing would be much more accurate.

In the event, both sides turned out to have the same

problem: the average number of days at work lost

through bombing was only five. Although often

workers’ homes were destroyed, morale stayed high: men and women

still worked, for their country and their distant children.

Robert Saxton

The Lost Traveller

Tony Venables

Graveyard Shift

Half-blinded by a winter of striplit

hall-tiles, that glare of spotlights

activated by timer at midnight, I squint

over news-print like the art college gargoyle.

Fake whorls on my kidney-shaped unit

Unstick and swim upwards. The latest

entrance is a revolver, which gusts all night.

Students keep on kicking the self-shutters.

Do you watch over me, Claire? Are the homeless

your friends? Ed struts bird-like, buys time

pointing at vents, flaps his tattooed arms

then cries. Weak pigeons that clamber

in, hunched old pilots, are they sent?

I peer, sphinx-like, over an Austen or Bronte.

To me, time ís a wing, touches gently along

memories I have. Or it ís a stroke of water,

brushes oil fainter. Every night, I read

some of the notebooks you filled, picture

your face, that final week so bony.

The vagrants I’m meant to keep out

are angels and stare in. Footsteps become

moonlighting students, who leave folios.

I flick through binders. Portraits reappear

later framed, in college shows, and named.

Sometimes, I wonder how you appear now.

Remember the art magazines on your desk?

I bring them with me. From one, bronze leaves

floated as I ruffled the soft pages,

spread on my counter, brittle veined,

each thinner than a leaf. Where, in our

walled old garden, did you find them?

Antony Nichols

Wherefore all the Wormy Circumstance?

Helena Nelson

Ode to Someone in the Pool

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

We chase each other round and round the lane

but never close the gap, swimming at the same pace,

so though weíre fast, and out of breath, weíre static

relative to each other, as figures on a Grecian urn.

Mid-lane your torso, flank, calf slide past, cinematic,

and then the after-image of your liberated foot

flutter-kicking, sticks in my mind

the way a shard washed up from the Aegean

sticks in history. Another lap, and my brow moves

towards you like the crest of a wave

moving towards a shore, but doesnít break:

dolphins must make passes like this.

Once, our wrists smacked blindly above the surface.

But I donít want to touch you.

I like your face obscured. Beneath those goggles and bubbles

I’m free to see a marble face, eyelessly outstaring

the passage of time we metronomically keep

trying to escape with our bodies intact,

your fluid body poised as if in museum lights

above the dirty flow of aging flesh beneath

gaping like fish, lapping at your pedastal.

Iím lulled by the pace into feeling

we could spin around this watery orb for ever;

but then you break our silent pact, by stopping at the wall.

I see a corruptible red mouth, opening to speak.

Anything it says will be bathetic.

Cate Parrish

Keats and Coldness

James Burton