[Patric Dickinson, Poet] Letters and poems (large quantity) sent to his Mistress and Muse, Sarah Hamilton; 'My Pallas, O Athene', 'the best Muse in the business'

171 original poems by Patric Dickinson (mostly unpublished), with 474 autograph letters (a total of 991 pages of correspondence) and 349 postcards to his mistress and 'Muse' Sarah Hamilton, along with an early draft of his autobiography, and other items including letters to Hamilton from Dickinson's wife the poet Sheila Shannon, and typescripts of an original play and a few of Dickinson's BBC radio scripts. Eloquent and poignant, the present collection allows us access to the intimate thoughts and feelings of a notable mid-century British poet and cultural figure.The material dates from between 1962 and 1993. It includes 474 Autograph Letters Signed, with a total of 991pp of text (534pp in 8vo and 457 in 12mo), together with 349 Autograph Cards Signed, many of them plain and with writing on both sides. (Dickinson - hereafter PD - is an unusual correspondent, filling almost every page and card with text from top to bottom in his small and disciplined hand: there are hardly any blank spaces to any of his communications. In consequence the amount of text is far greater than is usual in the correspondence of the period.) Fewer than half of the letters are fully dated, and these are mostly from the period 1979-1993. The earliest letter is from 1962, the year the affair appears to have begun. A few foolscap 8vo letters are written on the back of pages of typescript from PD's BBC radio scripts, with transcripts of his narration. Among other original material both typed and in autograph is an early draft of Dickinson's 1965 autobiography The Good Minute, and a typescript of his 1964 poetry collection The Cold Universe. The material is in good condition, with a handful of items with light staining and wear. PD had a habit of reconditioning postcards by sticking a large white label over the written-over side of a postcard (these were called by him his 'usings-up'), and a few of these labels are worn or detached, but with no loss of text. A large number of letters are written in what PD's BBC radio producer Piers Plowright described as PD's 'famous brown ink'. Almost all are addressed from 38 Church Square, Rye (many with a large letterhead of an engraving of the church), and SEH's address is usually given as 33 Regent's Park Road, London. A few items are on letterheads of the Savile Club, London, an institution which features in the correspondence (and Dickinson's autobiography). Most of the items are signed 'P.', with a few signed 'Patric', others with a monogram of a P above a D looking like a B, and some pet names such as 'Your Patricness' and 'The Professor', as well as Greek characters (in particular the initials of Pallas Athene). There are occasional doodles, and pictogram games with arrangements of addresses. Also present are a number of loose envelopes.The extracts at the end of this description give a taste of the character of the correspondence. They are arranged under the following headings: BBC; Bowrfell; His character; Charles Square; Envy; Family; First meeting; Friends and acquaintances; Golf; Letter writing; Arranging liaisons; Mortality; Music and the arts; Politics; Their relationship; A Rift in Time (1982); His wife Sheila Shannon; His writing; SEH's writing; SEH's personal affairs.The description is arranged as follows:1. Overview2. Poems, 1962-1989 A. Separate autograph poems B. Autograph poems in letters and postcards C. Printed keepsake poems3. Autograph criticism4. Typescripts5. Miscellaneous6. Correspondence from his wife to his mistress, 1966-20027. Extracts from correspondence, 1962-19931. OverviewDarling E after I'm dead, if I get any posthumous recognition - flog all my poems that you have - most of my best - but please, oh please, not my letters to you. They're for you & me. I'd hate anyone else to see, but if you go broke, then do. I shant know. I suppose some weevil of a Thesis-monger might discover you. On 31 January 1994 John Mole published in the Independent a long and appreciative obituary of his friend and colleague the 'broadcaster, playwright, golfing blue, and freelance man of letters' Patric Dickinson (Patric Thomas Dickinson, 1914-1994). Dickinson was above all, Mole wrote, 'a lyric poet who stayed the course'. In the blurb to his 1965 autobiography 'The Good Minute' (subtitled 'The Autobiography of a Poet Golfer') Dickinson had described himself as a 'poet and impresario of poetry', and as Mole pointed out, from 1942 his work as a 'radio editor and producer of distinction' (although he retired from the BBC in 1948 he continued as a freelance) placed him firmly at the centre of the British cultural milieu: commissioning a wide range of verse for broadcast, and working with poets such as Dylan Thomas, Cecil Day Lewis and Roy Campbell, actresses Flora Robson, Peggy Ashcroft and Jill Balcon, and actors Robert Donat, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud. From his marriage in 1945 to fellow-poet Sheila Shannon (Sheila Dunbar Shannon, 1913-2002), Dickinson lived in Rye in Sussex, 'a town to which he became devoted and which reciprocated his affection'. Mole's obituary ends by stressing Dickinson's commitment to family life, and to his grandchildren in particular. He ends with one of Dickinson's last poems, 'Generations', with the lines: 'Latch on to every morning | A way of loving and leaving | You can give to the unborn.' The present correspondence shows that Mole's account of Dickinson's domestic felicity is not the whole story. Dickinson was also a 'maverick classicist', who produced 'acclaimed translations of Aristophanes and Virgil', but Mole believed that it was his 'immaculately unsentimental poems of love and loss on which his reputation [would] almost certainly come to rest'. He experienced a late flowering, with the 1982 collection 'A Rift in Time' widely acclaimed as his finest poetic achievement. Why the volume which Dickinson described as 'my best' should be dedicated to 'Sarah' can now be revealed. The present correspondence uncovers a secret side of Patric Dickinson's personality. In more than eight hundred letters and postcards he conveys in the most intimate terms his innermost thoughts and feelings to the dedicatee of A Rift in Time, his mistress Sarah Hamilton (Sarah Emmeline Hamilton, born according to him in 1947, but from other sources born in 1934). Eloquent and lyrical, and written in a tight and disciplined calligraphic hand, letter after letter expresses deep love and wistful longing, with growing frustration at his failing health and impending mortality. The physical element of the relationship is not touched upon, but we are granted a glimpse of the mind of a poet as he reveals to his mistress and muse thoughts and feelings so intimate that he would not even confide them to his wife. ('I know I could say anything' he says in one letter, and 'I could never say it to anyone else' in another.) Dealing as it does with adultery between a man and a woman twenty years his junior, the collection also raises questions regarding deceit and emotional manipulation. 'Everyone who has it,' PD told SEH in 1982, 'thinks A Rift in Time my best but no-one has even asked who is Sarah? which is what I wanted. These are poems, your poems & now they're gone (into print). I feel bereft, forlorn.' And in an account of a 'little overflow party' for the book, held by the publishers Chatto & Windus: 'When everyone says this is my best lot it leaves me flat: wanting to do better & what for & who for? Somebody knows. Will she say?' Much is explained in a letter from 1981, announcing that the book has been accepted for publication: 'It's your book - especially, & most of the poems in it are for you &, I daresay, hang around on that ledge above your bed (& are soporific & help you sleep.) But, if England lasts another year, there it will be - your own secretest of presents. [...] It could say, in the prelims, For Sarah, For S. E. H. or not at all. I'd love it to be For Sarah because I love her so. Nobody who matters to you & me, & they arent many, doesnt know that I love my dear goddess! Nobody will mind. So you must NOT. Please? It'll be a glory for me like a rain-moon-bow. Ever seen one? I have. A rift in time.' At the start of the affair an incident of great significance to PD occurred while on a walking-tour of Cumbria, and it indicates his tendency to put SEH on a pedestal: 'About fifteen years ago on a gray hot clammy day we were all up Mosedale; & now or never, well, I suddenly said 'I will climb Bour Fell' - it's quite a high one, a beautiful pyramidal shape. What I never told you, or anyone till now, is that I had one of those polyphotos of you, & I hid it under a big stone on the top. I look up to it from here. You must think me such a silly romantic. I look up somewhere I shall not be again. My love for you is longer, older, stronger to give now, & I do hope more sensible darling E.' Throughout the correspondence PD leaves SEH in no doubt that she is his 'dear goddess'. 'One prays to all sorts of gods & goddesses', he tells her, 'immortals who yet live in Time'. Although he calls on her spirit in times of trouble she is not 'a goddess of bread-&-butter reviews', but 'une d?esse et un bijou', a 'left-over nymph from Delphi or Olympos', to be addressed throughout (in both Roman and Greek script) in variations of Pallas Athene: one letter for example begins 'Sarah my darling, my Pallas, O Athene' , and another ends 'O Sarah Pallas Emmeline Athene Love love love | P.' Other salutations more are revealing: 'My darling Rye furniture designer', 'Sweet darling organisational woman' and 'my darling Peruvian traveller'. The variations on the word 'dear' in his salutations have an almost incantatory effect: 'My darling dear', 'Dear dearer dearest darling Sarahness', 'My dear dearer dearling'. He claims to have written her 'thousands of letters' over the years, and it is clear that he fears that she finds his obsessive solicitude stultifying, on one occasion wondering whether a couple of days without a letter might be a 'blessed rest', and on another undertaking not to send her 'a plethora of letters to come back to'. Another time he asks her not to mind his 'outpourings': ' I do love you so, & I'm no sledgehammer, but I'm sure you know, anyway a bit'. Elsewhere he concedes: 'Yes I'm a worrier, but also a terrier'. The earliest item is a carbon of a rather gushing letter from SEH to PD, dated 5 May 1961, and from the tone of PD's earliest letters the affair appears to have been under way by 1962. In 1965 the pair were collaborating: there is a flirty receipt for an unused design of the dust-jacket of 'The Good Minute' by Sarah Hamilton & Partners (a copy of the jacket is also present), dated 7 August 1965. In an undated letter Dickinson recalls the circumstances of their meeting: 'It's more than 20 years since a girl with a key stood on the step. I'm Sarah Hamilton she said - & though I didn't know it; my life was changed for as a long as I live. Yours was, too, though I hope not so much. You know you have my love for ever, you have my poems too. More than a key was lost & found'. PD is at pains throughout to stress that his wife is complaisant. (At one point he describes 'the love & affection that is stored for you, to no-one's hurt, no-one's, unless yours which I think, now, you must know couldnt be true?') On 30 December 1982 he writes: 'My dear darling, | I wonder when I first wrote to you, & if I started Dear Sarah? It must have been to Bedford Avenue. I used to come, usually with a bottle of sherry . . . The shop's gone now. I must have written you thousands of letters since. Here's the last - for 1982! No, this isn't going to be a chronicle of time past, though I remember a lot of it, starting with a beautiful girl on the doorstep - a poem I havent written (yet) | I have never thanked you enough for your sweetness & scrupulousness. Being in love & loving can be different, or be together. With me, they are together. Sheila's always known so, & you have always been so generous & sweet & I know she loves you, too.' SEH conducts other affairs, and PD is clearly envious, while affecting not to be so: 'Of course men want to possess those they love. But, like Jim, like Roger it seems to me they are the wrong kind of men. They'd show you off. You are beautiful yes, but it's the essence, the being you, that matters. Giving is what the likes of us do, not possessing or being possessed. [...] I'm arrogant enough to think you need my love. I need yours.' SEH visits him in Rye when his wife is away (one abortive liaison is planned for when she is being 'lushed up' at the Imperial War Museum), and he visits SEH on his trips to London (where she occasionally acts as his 'beloved chauffeuse'), at her 'Garden (of Eden?) flat' in Regent's Park' ('your room is magic to share, & when you climb that ladder it is to go out of the world'). Things do not always go to plan: 'SE darling - so longing to see you! I have thought of a simple solution to my tangled web. Its this | Yes, you've got your parcel from Cumbria | BUT | I asked you not to open it till Christmas | SO | You dont know what's in it yet | O.K.? | So, nobody's feelings will be upset, & our secret kept secret... | Oh dear I dont think I'd have made a good spy, or politician, but I can still think.' PD is well aware of his good fortune: 'When I was ill, 2 years ago, I thought over my very lucky life. I had every thing. How could I be so selfish as to ask more? I confess I did, & you know I did. Your ringing on my birthday was, for me, a secret message summoning me back to life. You will never know, they say, but you do know what you gave me. It was [Greek], a gift for ever. I think of you so, here, in this ancient, present, indestructable landscape. [...] I still feel as if, being reprieved, I am immortal - but I am not. I want to fill the rest of my life & miss no giving of love that is in me. For Sheila. For you. For one or two more . . .' Until the end he is keen to emphasize her central position in his life, and her equal standing with his wife, but two years before her death he tells her, pointedly, that she is 'the sweetest & most beloved person in the world to me (bar one)'. PD is always keen to parade his cultural connections. ' Hullo, poet Ralph Richardson used to say to me at the Savile, Scribble, scribble, scribble I suppose '. And at the launch of A Rift in Time: 'The reading went well: a full house & people standing at the back. People I knew who came were Ursula V[aughan] W[illiams]; Jonathan Raban; Dallas Bower; Ian McIntyre (Controller [BBC] R[adio]3) (damn good of so-busy-him); John Rice; our nephew Michael; Norah & John Charlton from Chatto's; Billy Gotch of the Royal Literary Fund'. There are references to Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell, Cecil Day-Lewis (his widow Jill Balcon is a particular friend) and Christopher Fry. He finds a new radio play he is sent by the latter 'beautiful: a vision of gentleness & human dignity. Would you like to read it? It is a marvellous tender spiritual refreshment: man ought to be like this.' Dame Helen Gardner is an 'old mean cow'. He stresses their shared artistic temperaments: 'I keep thinking of your 'once' - your one room; & there it will be. Even a painter's one picture can change walls & houses. And a poem can have many shelves. I think I do understand all - or most - of the problems you face. I expect I'll write a poem for you; so in your room/rooms there must be hiding-places, like those secret drawers in old desks; even if the hiding-places exist only in the imagination.' On more than one occasion he stresses their common artistic temperament: I love you more than words can tell O but my poems do tell & tell & tell, in a way we creative people know.' The same phrase is used to link them in another letter: 'When I write a really dud poem I hear de la Mare's gently chiding voice. Remember, in all the hurlyburly of telephones, contracts, etc remember this: we - creative people - are what we are because of luck, hard work, & others believing in us. Oh darling SE this sounds a ghastly sermony piece. No it's not. [...] Bless Beatrix Potter for wakening me to language at about 3 or 4.' She is more of a 'telephoner', but he finds her capable of a 'lovely whirligig of a letter'. He sends her numerous poems ('I hope you'll read this in bed with your tea & put it on that shelf where so much love is & has been.') and the proofs of A Rift in Time, but on a couple of occasions his response to receiving her own poems is lukewarm. In 1990: 'By saying a poem wont do I mean wont do for me, as it is. I would like the poet to do a bit more work so as to make the poem. For me the rhymes are too glaring - naif? - & there isn't enough rhythm. i.e This seems to me notes for a poem I like what it says. Often work & practice do, in fact, lead to spontaneity! So dont be cross with me - Ive been at it for over sixty years, & feel old & cold & dispirited.' Although she differs from him politically ('I suppose, to quote W. S. Gilbert you were born a little Lib-er-al? Being born in the Raj I expect I was a little con-servat-ive. I sometimes wish I had, at Cambridge, been asked to spy, & I think I'd probably have said Well, if they played golf . . . . There is no political element in me, I find.'), she shares his passion for the arts: 'There was a good performance of Sibelius' Symphony No 2. last night', he writes. 'To me it is one of the greatest works; yes, romantic, but NOT falsely so as Tchaikowski often is. It never fails to leave me exhilarated & proud to be human.' And 'Listening to a good performance of Cesar Franck's D. Minor last night made me think a lot of thinks or thoughts.' And on another occasion: 'You know, every time I walk fr. the Savile to the BBC I stop & look at Epstein's Madonna & Child. It is inviolably beautiful.' As his life draws to a close, PD gains more recognition, with a picture unveiled at the Rye Art Gallery, and a visit to his home by a television crew. 'My life, times, etc. in 6 minutes, though it'll take 3 hours. I dont relish the prospect, but they all seem very nice & efficient. It's going to be done in the garden room. I am to read a poem or so, in the course of it. I'm so used to radio I'm a bit frightened of this. I'll try & think of you, & talk to you.' As a freelance, he must keep working to the end. Virgil is his 'one best-seller', and he delights in the royalty cheques he receives. 'Ive got approx ?350 in the last month for having had a classical education! Artistophanes & Vergil between them have paid my exorbitant water-rate, gas-bill, ditto electric, & telephone.' He yearns for 'journeyman work'. 'I'm quite busy, or unbored by what I have to do - & if I am bored, I say to myself this will pay the rates, or the car-license Or what-have-you, then I think what-have-I? So the floor gets littered w. books & bits.' Plans in 1990 to reprint his book 'A Round of Golf Courses' after forty years cause him some amusement. 'Staggered, I went into this, & by sleuthing have discovered that all is above board & somebodies thought somebody else was telling me. No-one did! And I am to be paid for it! And Im a Classic!!! Nonsense, but nice!' Throughout the correspondence the poems keep coming. In 1982 he writes: 'No-one but you is ever going to see this, no will ever know I have written it for you. All my love comes with it. I've said it in other poems, for years!' He urges her, perhaps disingenuously, to throw away the poems she doesn't like. Elsewhere he writes: 'A poem must keep its inviolable secret in public for others, strangers, & remain itself inviolate. Even such a silly squib as I'm now going to write down for you is secret'. He wonders how his reputation will fare: 'Im not popular. But no-one really knew about Thos. Campion or John Donne.' This leads him to drop a hint that even as death approaches, he would like SEH to have his child. With reference to his wife he writes to her: 'There are times when I - we - wake in the same bed & for all the inextinguishable till-death-do-us-part love, I confess to a longing that it were you, to myself | I'll have a gap: now read on. I dont think Im being treacherous, I think I'm being selfish & demanding to Sarah Hamilton. Forgive me, please. | Sometimes I have fantasies that it is you. Do not think I am jealous: I am envious of all those, not so many either. It's not wrong, I am a man, I could still beget. Dr Price did at 91. | One's thoughts, longings, desires, hopes are still based on the idea - for thousands of years, that man doesnt die & the wheat seeds in Tutankhamen's tomb did germinate.' He returns to the theme in another letter: 'We & I say we have in our humanness a Timeless seed. If I say I wish you & I had met, in time, & had children, you may not wish this at all. | Stone weathers slowly, & in the elements of human being it's not restorable. | Please, think it is. I think a lot about alternatives, possibles, & what is lost in the jungles of divorce, & psychiatrists' couches. They aren't funny.'' The changing nature of Rye depresses him, as do the deaths of friends and neighbours: 'Yesterday some time in the afternoon Derek Bridgwater's heart stopped. He was a wonderful man, he was 80, he was in the middle of a letter, as clear as ever, his pen was in his hand.'; 'there was a Police Car outside No 42. Oh lord, I thought, Evelyn's been burgled . . . & so she had, by death, on her way to bed, on Sunday night. He stole up silently & suddenly & went off with her heart.'; 'news from Rye: well, M-n-d had another collapse & was carted off to St Helens on Mon; is said to be mending. Some pretty shifty antiquery-junkery people who bought Martin Evans's house opposite the U. in E. St have been tied-up, & robbed by (I'd say) the same sort of too-close-to-the-windy-side-of-the-law people. [...] If robbers took up our floorboards, they'd find the dust of ages - & not gold at that!' Though the letters reveal a loving nature ('I cling on to thinking of my loving friends. I could not love an evil person. And foremost of those I love is Sarah Emmeline.'), his attitude to his family is a little more ambivalent than Mole suggests. After a day with his wife's cousin he writes that he is tempted to 'put Paraquat in his sherry'; and he finds comfort in the fact that his deafness means he does not have to hear a baby grandchild's crying. Old age is 'shaming & awful', and in the end he is no more than 'old crook-shoulder', beset with health worries and increasing loneliness: 'you see, apart from Sheila, there's no-one left in Rye to talk with, so I write poems for you - mostly they are - as you know - or letters to & for you. I hate not writing poems but in sifting I am a sieve & I do like it or wouldnt do it'. 'It's hell growing old & clapped out', he declares, but his optimism never falters. In what is probably his last letter to her, a month before his death, he is still reflecting on his good luck: 'My 11-pills-a-day regime at least keeps me where I am, mostly in a chair, or the bed! The breathlessness is v. trying & rather exhausting but I say to myself what can you expect? - you're amazingly lucky to be rising 79 & with a wife of 80 - & both with faculties pretty intact.' His own mortality is an ever more pressing theme. In 1989 he writes, with reference to those same grandchildren: 'My one sadness in extinction is that I will never see these grow up: Sarah or Tom (by the way the new one is to be called Adam.) I might, if my faculties hold, have another five or so years of darling you, & so Charlotte & Erica by proxy. There is only one way to die, for loving people to die, & that is simultaneously - not by accident & not likely. But, come, no Autumn Morbidity! I do hope I'll see you soon'.2. Poems, 1962-1989171 poems. Items 1-90 are discrete; items 91-171 are found in ALsS and ACsS.A. Separate poems[1] Title: 'Above Harter Fell'. Begins: 'These stars & planets have no names, / To name them is to lie; / I stare at this cold universe / So far from me, so near to me -'. Signed 'P. D. / With all my love. Not very good I'm afraid. / Better next time, I hope.' Undated. 1p, 8vo. Twenty-eight lines. In pencil. On reverse of typescript of p.13 of duplicated typescript of a poetic drama.[2] Title: 'Afflictions'. Begins: 'Afflictions seem to incite us mortals / More than happiness:'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 16mo. Eight lines. Annotated by PD: '2 refs / refs a) Macbeth's fears / b) Hamlets'.[3] Title: 'All Night & Day.' Begins: '- As if I stood on a hill / Anove ground-mist shrouding all: / I can hear normal stream / And domestic beast call / Within the hidden shape / Of a map none knows.' Unsigned and undated. On Rye Golf Club letterhead. Eighteen lines. Floor plan and recipe in other hands on reverse.[4] Title: 'All other loved places'. First line: 'Writing this now, all other loved places'. At end 'written on your birthday'. 1p, 12mo. Twelve lines. (One of two poems on separate leaves, accompanying an undated letter addressed to 'Beloved Sarah Emmeline'.)[5] Title: 'All Well.' Begins: 'Like a dark ransacked house / The owner still unaware, / Going carefreely somewhere, / And all the treasures pilfered.' Signed 'P. D.' Undated. 1p, 12mo. Sixteen lines.[6] Title: 'As a waterfall . . .' Begins: 'I climbed to our waterfall / Halfway up Walna Scar' Unsigned and undated. The second of two poems on 1p, foolscap 8vo, headed 'Two Poems for you.' Twenty-seven lines.[7] Title: 'Birthday Letter to Sarah / Highgate / 24th. February 1962'. Begins: 'How long upon the night's far face / And still procession of the skies / I've watched the wheeling zodiac's trace / With tranced, unlucid eyes, / In search of that one House of Heaven / Whose mansions are the sacred Seven!' Unsigned, but with two mongrams at end: 'A S' and S A I'. 4pp, 12mo. Eighty-four lines, in fourteen six-line stanzas.[8] Title: 'Books'. First line: 'There are books in May houses'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 4to. Sixteen lines.[9] Title: 'Calendar'. First line: ' 'O friends, I have lost a day' / The emperor Vespasian moaned / When the calendar was adjusted.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Fifteen lines. In pencil.[10] Title: 'Carmina Catulli / V.' Begins: 'Let's live, my Lesbia, let's love, / Let's take the strictures / Of carping old men as worth / Less than a farthing.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, 4to. Sixteen lines. Followed by: 'I've found, since Jan's death, I get great solace from reading Latin & Greek. This is a famous poem & I dont think this is a very good version. You could show it to your nice classical cons. & ask him?'[11] Title: 'A Coin'. Begins: 'Something sagging my pocket, / A coin I suppse; what spend it on? / Not copper nor gold nor silver / But it throbs & glitters like a star.' Third of three poems on a leaf (with 'Dialogue' and 'The Sirens'). Attached to ALS dated 3 September 1985.[12] Title: 'Coming down Bowfell'. Begins: 'What chance made the stream / Take a new course? Only / Ten yards away I could hear / The water at its needful / Incantations that shake / Stones in their deaf dream / To wake & seem to hop / Like frogs or podded seeds;'. Unsigned. Inscribed and dated: 'For you my darling / come back / 3/11/65 / And your picture is there under the cairn - for ever.' 2pp, 8vo. On Savile Club letterheads. Thirty-four lines. Attached to undated ALS. Printed in PD's 1970 collection More Than Time.[13] Title: 'Comings & Goings'. Begins: 'Beginnings we say, Endings we say: / What began where, what ended?' Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Eight lines.[14] Title: 'Deaf'. Begins: 'Deafness is close, near, / Lodging in walls, ceilings, / Yet including vast amorphous / Layers of light & darkness.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Fifteen lines. In pencil.[15] Title: 'A deep dry well.' Begins: 'At the bottom of a deep dry well / Lie dumpted some clapped out stars / That didnt shine enough, were obsolete, / Or planned-out. I'll get them for you.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Eleven lines. In pencil.[16] Title: 'Dialogue'. Begins: 'What do you hold / In that clenched fist?' Unsigned and undated. Dated by SEH to 3 September 1985. First of three poems on a leaf (with 'The Sirens' and 'A Coin'). Attached to ALS dated 3 September 1985.[17] Title: 'Down the Track'. First line: 'Down the track: go just past'. Unsigned and undated, but dated by SEH 4 August 1981. On card. 1p, 12mo. Twelve lines.[18] Title: 'Echo.' Begins: 'Do animals gossip? Sometimes / Get a rebound? did that cat / Go a bit too far? Alas for Echo, / Sweet nymph, Jupiter told her / Too many sly-bed asides.' Unsigned and undated. 2pp (one 8vo and one 12mo). Fifty lines, in two numbered parts. Annotated by SEH: 'Returning to P.D. - as requested!', and later in pencil, '& now back to S. E.'[19] Title: 'An evening garden'. First line: 'First it was purposeful:' Signed and dated 'P. D. | 21/VI/66.' 1p, 12mo. Nineteen lines.[20] Title: 'A Farm Death.' Begins: ' 'Another lonely man,' / Says the old priest;'. Unsigned and undated. Dated by SEH to 20 December 1980. 1p, 12mo. Twelve lines. In pencil. Pen note by PD: 'This isnt a 'you' poem & not even a very new poem but no-one's ever seen it. / It was Sarah Lindsay, wife of Robert whom we've known since first we went up Dunnerdale. Rbt. keeps going. / I cant know if this is any good. Is it? Do tell me?'[21] Title: 'A Field'. Begins: 'Between back & fell the rams / Look older than standing stone / As they grave in the cold twilight / Of a dull July.' Unsigned. Dated by SEH to 1 August 1981. 1p, 4to. PD notes that the poem was written: 'By Tarn Beck / & Tongue House farm'. Attached to ALS dated 1 August [1981]: 'I didnt throw the dud poem away after all! In my tenacious way, I worried the bone of it till it had a small bit of meat on it (see enclosed). I think it's O.K.'[22] Title: 'For S. E. H.' Begins: 'Imagine the moon again / Suddenly burning turning / The seasons over: new'. Signed 'P.' Undated. 1p, 12mo. On Savile Club letterhead. Eleven lines.[23] Title: 'For Sarah. 24.2.63.' Begins: 'No-one but you and I / Can ever, shall ever, know / What secret counties lie / Beneath this fall of snow'. Signed 'Patric.' Undated. 1p, 16mo. Twelve lines.[24] Title: 'For Sarah Lucy (six weeks on this planet)'. First line: 'O spick & span,'. Undated and unsigned. 1p, 4to. Twenty lines. Pencil note by SEH identifies the subject as PD's granddaughter.[25] Title: 'For you alone.' Begins: 'I woke at dawn & found / A poem in my head / As crystal round as if / I had looked into a Tear / Secretly shed. I saw'. Unsigned and undated. 2pp, narrow 12mo. Forty-nine lines. Annotated: 'Please, this is a rotten poem - keep it hidden - it's not for publication ever. I'll do you a better one soon.' Item 85 is in margin of p.1.[26] Title: 'Forecast | NOT to be taken personally by either S.' First line: 'I wouldnt have cared to live with you | If you were a 'climate' -'. Signed 'P.' Undated. 1p, landscape 8vo. Twelve lines. At end: Love, love, love. | P.'[27] Title: 'Give & Take.' Begins: 'So whole a giving, it's hard to think / Receiving otherwise.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Seven lines.[28] Title: 'Growing older'. Begins: 'Growing older one thought / You'll come to terms - / Rationalise your guesses. ' Unsigned and undated. The second of three poems on 1p, foolscap 8vo, headed 'Two & a half new poems to take away (sounds like Chinese food)'. Fifteen lines. Attached to undated ALS.[29] Title: 'H. D. S. E. C. D.' Begins: 'Two of us, four of us here now, | Who would not be but for four | Who loved their lives as we do. | War took the men; the women | Grew in an after-love,'. Unsigned and undated (1966). 1p, 4to. Twelve lines. Followed by note by PD: 'Written on 12. 12. 66. the anniversary of Mrs Shannon's death. My own mother, Eileen Constance, as you may know, died on my birthday. 26. 12. 47. If I've sent it, throw it away.'[30] Title: 'Hammering'. Begins: 'Ugly Hephaistos hammered away / On Olympos weapons for Gods / To kill each other with, / (If that were possible), / But won the Goddess of Love / Without a fight.' Undated and unsigned. 1p, 12mo. Twenty-four lines. One pencil addition.[31] Title: 'Hearing Aids'. First line: 'What an express boon'. Unsigned. Dated by SEH 30 January 1983. 1p, 12mo. Twelve lines.[32] Title: 'Herbert Forster'. Begins: 'I wonder who he was: / Herbert Forster / I asked him his name / In a dream, & he gave it me.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, 16mo. Seventeen lines. In pencil. Cancelled pencil draft of ten lines of 'Herbert' poem on reverse.[33] Title: 'Histories'. Begins: ' 'So runs the world away' / Emperors, slaves, as ever;'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 12mo. Twelve lines. Annotated by PD: 'Keep this? / Never published?' This poem does not appear to have been published.[34] Title: 'I. M. P.' Begins: 'And the newly the beloved dead / Give sort of clocks called days / To us living / Though only they can wind them.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, 8vo. Twelve lines. PD notes that the title is the initials of Ian MacNaughten Parsons.[35] Title: 'In a drear-nighted December | Aubade'. Unsigned and undated. First line: 'We live each every daylight'. Unsigned. [1982.] 1p, 12mo. Twelve lines. Followed by note (poem?) by PH: 'This is a poorish piece | but the last of 82 | Who knows when I | will be able to begin | 83.'[36] Title: 'In answer to no question'. First line: 'What love is? It needs two:'. Holograph. Signed 'P. D.' and dated 12 October 1966. 1p, 4to. Twelve lines. On Savile Club letterhead, London.[37] Title: 'Jigsaw'. Begins: 'There's a useful picture-crib on the box: / Jumble the tricksy pieces out, / So look-alike so cunningly not - / Which interlocks with which -'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 12o. Sixteen lines. With emendations.[38] Title: 'The language of water'. Begins: 'Often I talk to you at night | In the language of water:' Undated. Unsigned and undated. In pencil on blank card. Twelve lines. Ink note at end: 'The you is nearer the french 'on' but also it is you. I often do talk to you.'[39] Title: 'Letters'. Begins: 'How more than alone we are / Reading or writing letters,'. Unsigned and undated. The first of two poems on 1p, foolscap 8vo, headed 'Two Poems for you.' Eight lines.[40] Title: 'A lightening Room'. First line: 'Like a bat, like a moth,'. 1p, foolscap 8vo. Fifteen lines. In pencil. Preceded by: 'This is rather an enigmatic poem. It doesnt need factual explaining. I hope you'll read it for its sound & rhythm & its rather oblique feeling & thought. Plato, in his Ideas of what is Reality, as the image of man being seen in shadows cast by firelight on the walls of a cave. If I keep writing of echoes & shadows, you may guess why, but nobody else will know where is - / [title] A lightening Room'. Following poem: 'This is what I was telling you. Cut, from where it began, & my sternest critic doesnt know, or need to, where this is. It's where the poem is, to the Stranger. Oh my sweet darling (when you've read a far far lovelier poem on t'other side, you could cut off top & bottom, & show this to anyone. It's for you.' On reverse is a typescript of John Clare's 'The Green Glen'.[41] Title: 'Lincoln Cathedral. The small hours'. First line: 'Midnight & twelve dark doves'. Signed 'P. Wednesday.' On back of blank postcard postmarked 12 June 1964, addressed to SE at 11 North Audley Street, Grosvenor Square. Note at end: 'WLEO. This had 31 lines an hour ago!' Eighteen lines. Published in Clifford Dyment's anthology of 'New Poems' in 1966, and in PD's 1970 collection More than Time.[42] Title: 'Lines from an ancient language found on an Electricity bill.' Begins: 'O Zeus, O Jupiter Tonans, / Get in quick when you see / My body wilt, turn me into / A stove, a shell, a tree:' Unsigned and undated. The third of three poems on 1p, foolscap 8vo, headed 'Two & a half new poems to take away (sounds like Chinese food)'. Eight lines. Attached to undated ALS.[43] Title: 'Listening'. Begins: 'Now or never, never or now / Start listening for he echo / Of the never-said-aloud:'. Unsigned and undated. The first of three poems on 1p, foolscap 8vo, headed 'Two & a half new poems to take away (sounds like Chinese food)'. Sixteen lines. Attached to undated ALS.[44] Title: 'Listening to Mozarts Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments.' Begins: 'This magnificent / Acquisition & possession / Of shared solitude:'. Undated. 1p, 16mo. Fourteen lines.[45] Title: 'Listening to the Mozart Serenade for 13 Wind Instruments'. Begins: 'This miraculous / Acquisition & possession / Of shared solicitude:'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 12mo. Fourteen lines. In pencil. Another copy of last poem.[46] Title: 'A Lullaby for Adults'. Begins: 'Sea-rock & wind & sea / So many million years:'. Undated and unsigned. 1p, 4to. Nineteen lines. Also Item 112 below.[47] Title: 'Madrigal'. Begins: ' 'Never' & 'Tomorrow' - / Forbidding, forboding, gentle / Words in our tongue:'. Undated and unsigned. 1p, thin 12mo. Eight lines. On strip torn from letter to PD dated 9 March 1982.[48] Title: 'Meanings'. Begins: 'Like the Rosetta Stone / Or what Michael Ventris found'. Signed 'P.' Undated. On plain card. Fourteen lines. Published in 'A Rift in Time' (1982) and as a keepsake.[49] Title: 'Meetings & Mortalities . . .' Begins: 'Meetings & mortalities / Seem sure as parallels / When you are young. Undated. 1p, 8vo. Sixteen lines. In pencil. Item 115 is a version of this poem, without the final four-line stanza.[50] Title: 'O Cassandra'. Begins: 'No-one goes to an oculist / For symptoms of hindsight.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Fifteen lines. In pencil.[51] Title: 'Oh Midas'. Begins: 'This touching & this turning / Into cold static gold, / Without choice, poor Midas / What could be worse?' Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Twenty lines. With emendations. Note by PD in margin: 'This is the final version but one day you might flog it for more than a fair copy.'[52] Title: 'Old.' Begins: 'The lovely lively lilts have gone; / We lie besetting a skeleton.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Ten lines. In pencil.[53] Title: 'On seeing a Christian gardener at 80 (for A. V.)'. Begins: 'Three days to Christmas - a mild / Bright westerly morning -'. Unsigned. Dated 22 December 1980. 1p, 4to. Sixteen lines. In pencil. Attached to undated ALS, with postscript revealing the first name of the subject: 'I couldnt make up my mind whether to give the enclosed to Alec, or not - but I'm glad I did. He was v. pleased. He's 81 today.'[54] Title: 'On the verge of Speech.' First line: 'Testing, tasting, seeing, touching'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, on strip of paper. Five lines. On the other side is Item 67, dated September 1985.[55] Title: 'Ovid at Tomi'. Begins: 'Exile, banishment, it goes on, on - / Undertaking, hateful artefact / Of death-in-life, inhumanity / Like a wax exhibit: / 'Calvinism can set corpses grinning.' ' Signed 'P. D.' Undated. 2pp, foolscap 8vo. Forty-three lines, in three parts. Note at end: 'I see - I didnt choose or look, - that there's a very good poem of Louis' on the back.' On reverse of typescripts: the first leaf from a BBC Radio script ('Surprises, Accidents' by 'Selected and Compiled by Patric Dickinson'), the second reproducing Louis Macneice's poem 'Snow'.[56] Title: 'Plymouth Hoe. November 1965'. Begins: 'And I here, on the land-edge, sea-edge, map's-edge | See a kestrel hang suspended,'. Unsigned. 1965. 1p, 4to. Twenty-five lines.[57] Title: 'Poem'. Begins: 'There are two locks two keys, / To let out, to let in; / There is a room whose door, / If door of room there be . . . / There is a wall at least'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 8vo. Thirty lines.[58] Title: 'Portrait'. Begins: 'So I 'sit' & 'sit' until / I wonder who I am -'. Unsigned and undated. On plain card. Twelve lines.[59] Title: 'A Prayer to Pallas Athene.' Begins: 'Listen, Athene, please / Let the owl of your wisdom perch / On a particular place - / (I'll whisper where it is.)' Signed and dated 'P / for 24.2.81'. 1p, 8vo. Twenty-five lines. In pencil. Attached to ALS dated by SEH TO 28 February 1981: 'Please just read the enclosed, not really as a poem (I've written you proper poems) but as an impromptu because I wanted you to have something. I'll do a much better one, that I know, & quite soon. Just keep this as a scribble.'[60] Title: 'The Professor'. Begins: 'Here in this glade they will meet - / (The Professor will explain) / Do you hear the leaves whispering / 'There is nothing, nothing again'.' Unsigned and undated. 3pp, 12mo. On Savile Club letterheads. Fifty-five lines. With deleted line and two pencil emendations. At head: 'Again this is really a rough draft. It could be for a ballet, in a sense'.[61] Title: 'A Riddle. for S. E. H.' Begins: 'Climb this hill - but it has no top. / Cross this stream - but it has no banks'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 12mo. Ten lines. Signed annotation by PD: 'There's one good line - which dyou think it is? Soon a decent poem will come. / P. T.' Published in 'The Good Minute' (1965).[62] [Title: 'A Rift in Time'.] Untitled early draft beginning: 'There is a rift in time / Like a geological fault'. Unsigned and undated. On back of envelope addressed to PD. Heavily-worked pencil draft.[63] Title: 'A Rift in Time'. Begins: 'There is a rift in time / Where men & women can meet / Who cant - not saying 'halt'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 12mo. Fifteen lines. At end: 'Keep this for me to copy? It's not really finished. but I want you to have it.'[64] [Title: 'A Rift in Time'.] Untitled draft beginning: 'There is a rift in time / Where men & women can meet / Who are not coincident.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, 12mo. Fourteen lines, four of which are deleted. In pencil.[65] Title: 'A Robin Singing'. Begins: ' 'Tell secrets by a waterfall' / Where the loud water eats / The impervious stone high / On a cold hill confide / Your loves & hates:'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, foolscap 8vo. Thirty-one lines. In pencil.[66] Title: 'Separations'. Begins: 'The civil servants of our flesh / In their crumbling offices / Can get files mixed, memoes that wilt / In out-trays, in-trays, like dead sehlls / On a lost beach of guilt.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, 16mo. Note by PD: 'Thinking of things, people, too many, who have come to grief)'.[67] Title: 'Setting Free.' First line: 'Well, there it is, not understanding / This glass between, the obvious light:'. Unsigned and undated. Dated by SEH to September 1985 1p, on strip of paper. Eight lines. Item 54 is on the reverse.[68] Title: 'Sight.' Begins: 'I think of Odysseus how he brutally / Had to burn out the eye of the Cyclops,'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Eleven lines. With explanatory note by PD.[69] Title: 'The Sirens / What songs the sirens sang . . .? Thos. Browne'. First line: 'Sail by, or not, there's always one / Of the crew goes overboard'. Second of three poems on a leaf (with 'Dialogue' and 'A Coin'). Attached to ALS dated 3 September 1985.[70] Title: 'Small Hours'. First line: 'Loving you more than Time has time for,'. 1p, 12mo. Twelve lines. (One of two poems on separate leaves, accompanying an undated letter addressed to 'Beloved Sarah Emmeline'.) Published in PD's 1970 collection More than Time.[71] Title: 'A Stone Tower'. Begins: ' 'No doubt the stone ran blood,' / In a half-sleep I heard / This anonymous practical voice,'. Unsigned and undated. Eleven lines.[72] Title: 'Sundials'. First line: 'Neither past nor future tense | Leaves one danging in suspense | On the platform of the True:'. 1p, 4to. On separate leaf, accompanying undated ('Thurs 2nd') ALS. Twenty lines, in four numbered stanzas. In margin: 'This is sort of all one poem but can be taken in parts.'[73] Title: 'This time, next time . . .' Begins: 'Walking through time together / As if the stairway down the cliff / Were a Mozart phrase, as if'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, foolscap 8vo. Twenty-two lines. With three emendations. At end: 'Keep, darling. As you see not quite right but better than your brief glance. / P.S. Ive sold over 40,000 copies of the Aeneid in America! But not a dime for me yet beyond the advance. Never mind, isnt it exciting?'[74] Title: ' To play the watchman - W. S.' First line: 'Loving you is as simple as sunlight'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Twelve lines. A draft, with emendations. At end: 'Make, slowly, sense of this. it is sense.'[75] Title: 'To Vergil.' Begins: 'You brought to me gently in your fist / A swallow strayed / Into the house, a bird far other / Than Vergil is -'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Headed: 'You know I'm always going on about time. This is a little poem I put into Winter Hostages. It is really / [title] To Vergil.'[76] Title: 'Today.' Begins: 'A cooling, a cold world: / No new forms, no new modes. / Apes become men, men / emain apes, and the lion & the lizard / Scutter over the bones / Of the old & the newer gods.' Unsigned and undated. On Savile Club letterhead. 1p, 8vo. Eighteen lines.[77] Title: 'Tracing Paper'. Begins: 'So, extra carefully, as a child / You kept the tracing paper / In place, & slowly neatly / - Dont let it slip - / Did the outline of a face / Or a ship, properly, or scribbled over / The King-&-Britannia's penny.' Unsigned and undated. 1p, 8vo. Fourteen lines.[78] Title: 'Two Singers'. First line: 'She sang so perfectly, so truly,'. On one side of card. Eight lines. In pencil. One emendation.[79] Title: 'The Unhappy Frog.' Reads: 'I am a frog a Princess kissed, / But I didnt turn into a prince. / My pals say I'm lucky what I missed, / But I feel a worse frog since.' 1p, 16mo. PD writes: 'rather Stevie Smith-ish / I can do nothing but these sort of squibbles @ the moment. I feel a bit of a worse - but rebellious - frog too.' Item 166 on the other side.[80] Title: 'Waking'. Begins: 'And there you go on filling / This leaking kettle of sleep, / Sometimes to wake in the dark'. Unsigned. Dated 5 November 1981. 1p, 4to. Seventeen lines.[81] Title: ' 'Waking dreams' '. First line: 'We have these 'waking-dreams,' '. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 12mo. Twenty-four lines.[82] Title: 'What to do'. Begins: Take all those letters and / Stuff them into a / Sack'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 12mo. On pink paper. Accompanying an undated ALS. A spoof, preceded by: 'A late entry to the W H Smith Young Writers' Competition (8 & under group) / Name: Patrice Zombi Thomaso Dickson / Address: 38 1/2 Church Square Rye Sus / Date of Birth: Unknowable / School: Peacock Incomprehensible'. After the poem: 'I certify that this is not a copy or near copy of anything I have read (or ever will read:) / Signed / Monsignor Umberto Zombi (Uncle) my poor little nephew cannot read or write. [Ed. then who wrote this?)'[83] Untitled. Begins: 'Dear, dearer, dearest, did you learn comparison? / (Too often it is what a woman marries on) / This note - extempore in couplets - finds / In us at least the engagement of two minds . . . / Assume in me for better or for worse / A letter will be shorter if in verse / But even in verse one's feelings may be better / If disciplined to rhyme & to a letter.' 2pp, foolscap 8vo. Seventy-two lines, in five sections, ending: 'This page is done - oh be an Ark and dove me / With Sprigs of a new world. I need it. But I'm greedy / So here's my hungry love. Your ever P.' Only other text heading the first page: 'My BEST beheaded notepaper.'[84] Untitled. Begins: 'Did you really think | I was going to paint you?' Undated. Four lines on small card. Beneath laid-down reproduction of self-portrait by Beryl Cook.[85] Untitled. First line: 'Not a word my love can bring'. Unsigned and undated. In margin of 1p, narrow 12mo, also carrying the first page of Item 25. Four lines. Annotated: 'This is just a silly little verse even worse than the other. Destroy them.'[86] Untitled. First line: 'Now, it is now, now / My body says, my mind says:'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 12mo. Twenty lines. Heavily revised, with notes and doddles in the margins.[87] Untitled. Begins: 'Saint Patrick wasnt Irish - / Twice he crossed over / With a blarney stone in his pocket / And a lucky four-leaf clover'. Undated. On card. Fourteen lines. In green felt-tip pen, with illustration of patch of four-leaf clovers.[88] Untitled. Begins: 'There are moments in time & place / You take the rod and strike / The rock's face, craving water, / And the rock rightly grows / Bigger, more obdurate / Till it seems time & place / Master you; you fear; and the rock says / 'Time knows. Time knows this.' ' Unsigned. Dated at end 5 March 1963, '4.45 pm.' 3pp, 8vo. On Savile Club letterheads. Sixty-four lines. At head: 'Regard this as just a first attempt to say something.'[89] Untitled. Begins: 'We meet in a kind of midday / Starlight; cannot outdo / This sun; know a now-or-never / Lurks in every shadow;'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 8vo. Twenty-four lines. Deleted title and one emendation. Accompanying undated ALS. 'The encl. poem has not winged its way to Formentera, so here's another copy. It's rather an obligue way of saying three words.'[90] Untitled. Begins: 'Your eyes were made to glow / Like stars or flowers; / If they had 'joy' to know / As meaning in our tongue:'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, 12mo. On Savile Club letterhead. Twenty-eight lines.B. Poems in letters and postcards[91] Title: 'Ago'. First line: 'Then, drop your golden heart'. At start of ACS with postmark 11 April 1983. Six lines.[92] Title: 'Attic Workroom'. Begins: 'What goes on here nobody knows / But a mouse, an angel & a devil, / (They can argue which is which).' In undated ALS. Fourteen lines.[93] Title: 'Bee or Butterfly.' Begins: 'O, there it is, not understanding / The glass between, the obvious light: / Trapped bee, or tortoiseshell battering / What it feels against an unknown might.' In undated ALS, dated by SEH to 1985. In margin by fourth line: '? cap M.' Followed by: 'Only a squib. I think 'The glass between' would be a good title for my ? next book. Oh never let there be a glass between us!' The poem appears again, with slight changes, in another (earlier?) undated ALS, beginning 'And there it is, not understanding' PD writes there, in the margin by the fourth line: 'Wordsworth would have given Might a cap.' And the poem is preceded by: 'I have fallen in love again. The trouble is it's you again, &, I dare say, again & again . . . / Do words sometimes look funny & you wonder if you've spelt them right? AGAIN suddenly looks odd.' And followed by 'I think if ever I publish another book I shall call it 'The Glass Between'.[94] Title: 'Birthday'. Begins: 'The calendar compels / These recognitions / Of time's flow. What else? / I love you the day before, / The day after, & till I die. / Then my poems must do their best. / Stars change their positions / In the firmament of Man's eye / Yet seem forever - O trust / In the Uncommon Sense, / The ever-Present Tense, / Of the Universe, of us.' Four three-line stanzas. In undated ALS, dated by SEH 19 February 1982. 'No-one but you is ever going to see this, no will ever know I have written it for you. All my love comes with it. I've said it in other poems, for years!' In an ALS dated 30 November [with 1982 added by SEH] PD writes the poem out again, with the following: 'I wonder if you remember the poem I sent for your last birthday which, of course, I did not, & will not publish.'[95] Title: 'Blackbird'. Begins: 'As if it could hear itself / Self-consciously, like a human, &'. On ACS dated 31 March/1 April, with 1985 postmark. Eight lines. Later version of next, with a couple of incidental differences.[96] Title: 'A Blackbird Singing (today)'. Begins: 'As if it could hear itself / Self consciously, like a human, &'. In ACS with 6 June 1984 postmark. Eight lines.[97] Title: 'A Candle Lullaby'. Begins: 'Whenever you feel alone / Light this candle, silent candle. / It will burn / Softly, & put & guard & keep / Your throbbing self asleep.' In undated ALS. Ten lines. 'what excuse is there for a recovered pen than to write a poem? only a little one'.[98] Title: 'A Dancing Star'. Begins: 'Well, yes, it must be so: / Some trick of atmosphere / And light, but low in the weswt / Over Birker Moor in the early night-time / There's a dancing star.' On undated ACS. Fourteen lines. Followed by: 'So, in this slight piece, something has come out of my indolence. It's not profound, but I think a nice & quite Jolly-lolly thing. Hope you'll like it?'[99] Title: 'Dead Flowers.' Begins: 'Dry in an empty vase, empty, / In a living-room but somewhere / Had roots in earth; here, / Neither forced nor actual tears / Nor water will relieve / Or re-live them, they are empty,'. In undated ALS. Eighteen lines. 'This poem is about the small sorrows of loss & death, it came out of the death of someone I loved most dearly, called Freddie Pelham-Clinton, an aristo, old Eton, good, & loved oysters. But it means something far different. There is no time for coice of choice.'[100] Title: 'Dehors'. Begins: 'On frappe ? la porte; / Un spectre ainsi perdu;' In undated ACS. Six lines, in French.[101] Title: 'A Dream'. First line: 'Then pour into my eyes'. In ALS. Four lines.[102] Title: 'Green Piece'. First line: 'A polar bear is drifting | South on a broken flow,'. On one side of card, with undated ANS on other. Sixteen lines. Preceded by: 'Here's something Ive tried to write in proper, serious French.'[103] Title: 'Herbert Forster'. Begins: 'I wonder who he was: | Herbert Forster | I asked his name | In a dream, & he gave it to me.' On one side of card, with undated ANS on other side. Eighteen lines followed by 'Only a squib'.[104] Title: 'Human'. First line: 'And so oppressed by intellect,'. In ALS. No year ('Friday, last of August. [1984?]') Ten lines, with two lines deleted. Followed by: 'sorry I've made such a mess. I was copying this out from a train-joggled draft. You know I sort of l-l-l-love y-y-you & n-n-n-need you like h-h-h-ell. It's a long tunell [sic] l-l-l-long.'[105] Title: 'In a Forest of Conifers.' Begins: ' 'A dark dry sea.' Silent. / You walk soft needle-waters / Not lost exactly, nor drowning, / Nor wanting to be found.' In undated ALS. Twelve lines.[106] Title: 'In Dreams'. Begins: 'Often in dreams I wander / Through splendid cities that seem / Utterly real & solid. I get lost,'. In ALS of 7 August 1983. Eleven lines. Followed by: 'Peoples seldom speak of dreams, or if they do, one doesnt remember. This child did, & those were his words.'[107] Title: 'Intimations of Innocence'. Begins: 'That Knowledge-Tree in Eden / Could not itself know / The fate of the sorrowful-sweet fruit / It was ordained to grow. / Men judge by windfalling results, / Preferring blossom to root: / Who but lovers have ever seen / Deciduous trees turn evergreen?' In undated ALS. Dated by SEH to 1982. Eight lines. 'Here's a little semi-epigrammatic sort of poem for you.'[108] Title: 'Lament for the Grace Years'. Begins: 'Within each mortal year / Is hidden another, / Like a grace-note, go-between, / Not published in the score, / But essential to the tune / One's heart must play by ear.' In undated ALS. On Savile Club letterhead. Six lines. Of the title PD writes: 'This is a supreme mistyping of The Great Yachts!!! from a Leicester Arts Officer Here's my answer [...] It's only a squib, but like everything I write it's secret is in you.'.[109] Title: 'Lines on a fine day.' Begins: 'If I believed in reincarnation, / (Which I dont),'. In ACS with postmark 16 September 1982. Ten lines.[110] Title: 'Lines to an understudying pen.' Begins: 'If one's special pen breaks / One must swear in a new one / With a proper handshake'. In AL. Nine lines. 'I came across this in tidying up & the Mad Rousseau I'd kept in it.' On proof leaf of his Aristophanes.[111] Title: 'Loving Fingers'. First line: 'You are honest spies'. In ALS. Six lines. 'Here is a little conceit, the point, only, being between Touch & intangible'.[112] Title: 'Lullaby for Adults'. Begins: 'Sea-rock & wind & sea / So many million years; / Points on the earth blossom / With rockets, crocuses - / O present, quick in the womb, / Shall we call him Aeschylus?' Sent as ACS, postmark 10 December 1962. Nineteen lines. Also Item 46 above.[113] Title: 'Madrigal'. Begins: 'Never & Tomorrow | Forbidding, forboding, gentle, | Words in out tongue.' In ACS with postmark 22 March 1983. Eight lines.[114] Title 'Making Anthologies'. Begins: 'There is this whirling swarm / In curious cleft & tree. / You take it if you can; / Reduce, hive, discipline, / To one solitary bee / That sucks its honey from / Flowers it cannot see.' In undated ALS, with PD noting: 'I'm really sodden with poetry.'[115] Title: 'Meetings & Mortalities.' Begins: 'Meetings & mortalities / Seem sure as parallels / When you are young.' On undated ACS (with reference to 'Geller's forks'. Twelve lines, taking up one side of a plain card, the other side filled with text ('I have another poem, on rather rickety stocks, I shall try to get at later today.'). Item 49 is a version of this poem, with extra four-line stanza.[116] Title: 'Milk Dirge'. First line: 'Think of the milk, the mothers' milk,'. In ALS dated 9 November 1989. Nine lines.[117] Title: 'Mountfield.' Begins: 'So I go past, in the fading light / The house you were born in: I'll never see / Where I was born, so continents away, / But you have knocked at, eaten, slept / In the house I hope to die in.' In undated ALS. Twenty-two lines. 'As I was coming down in the train y'day, here are some lines, for you only, I despondently scribbled: they're not a poem. Only for you to see. The man opposite - his name I saw on his briefcase it was Captain Stannard - was a bit appalled to see someone writing. I'd dare say he was R.N. (rtd).' On reverse is a duplicated typescript of Charles Sorley's 'There, where the rusty iron lies', to which PD has appended an autograph note. 'Charles Sorley was killed in 1915 at the age of 19. He was a twin & I met his brother in the early '60's - I love this poem.'[118] Title: 'Revolution'. Begins: 'Where is le Duc de Brie? / Where Le Seigneur de la Gauche?' In undated ALS. 'This is no more than a witticism.'[119] Title: 'Two Singers.' Begins: 'She sang so perfectly so truly wholly / At ease knowing each not / Each syllable by head & heart.' On ACS (with '2 Parts' below). Six lines.[120] Title: 'O Wordsworth April 1983.' First line: 'Those wretched daffodils | Arent fluttering & noddering -'. In ACS. 'TUES 5 [April 1983] | NEW INCOME TAX YEAR begins - but we dont get even a cold holiday for that'. Nine lines. Followed by (regarding word in last line of poem): ' 'Pocketing' is perhaps better than 'lifting' but it's only a squib.'[121] Title: 'On a Pair of Bird-watching Dons'. Begins: ' 'That was a Whiter Whiptop by its looks. / No dear. I do not place it in my books; / 'It couldnt be.' (So, if it werent for words / To feather them - would there be any birds?)' In ALS dated 13 January 1987. Preceded by: 'A poem is only a poem if it can't be said any other way at all ever, before, now, after. [...] A poem must keep its inviolable secret in public for others, strangers, & remain itself inviolate. Even such a silly squib as I'm now going to write down for you is secret - this Pair, jokes of birdwatching dons - who were they? it doesnt, musnt, matter'.[122] Title: 'Ordnance Survey'. Begins: 'How anyone makes maps; / Shapes, sizes, continents,'. In ACS with postmark 16 March 1982. Seven lines. Preceded by: 'I wrote this, y'day, before I got yr letter'.[123] Title: 'A Sad Toad'. Reads: 'I am the toad a Princess kissed / But I didnt turn into a Prince. / Republican toads say I ought to feel better, / But I dont. I feel much worse since.' In undated ALS. Preceded by: 'Here's a little verse - rather Stevie-ish - to amuse you (I hope)'.[124] 'St Crymble's Eve'. Begins: 'My hand on your heart's breast / Draws on a store / Of millions of midnights of fallen stars'. On ACS with postmark of 10 December 1981. Twelve lines. Followed by: 'This poem was/is meant to be about love & time that, in a moment, one can be aware, in a double kind of scale. It is not meant to be direct. The centre of the earth is fire, hence volcanoes. The symbolic centre of people is fiery. Suddenly one can be linked with millions & a moment. I've taken a copy. Do please throw it away if you dont like it.' There are also four glosses in the margin. On same ACS as the following.[125] 'St Crymble's lament.' Begins: ' 'My hand on your heart's foot'. . . / Symbol, image of my homage,'. On ACS with postmark 10 December 1981. Ten lines. Notes of poem: 'I hope you'll NOT be NOT AMUSED by the above mortal work. I just want to try to cheer you up'. On same ACS as the previous. [126] 'Shake.' Begins: 'Banished my hand burns, / Whether ice or fire, / Burns from a trespass,'. On undated ACS with Savile Club letterhead.[127] Title: 'Signed Copies'. Begins: 'Signing one's name, time after time, / Beginning to wonder who one is - / O Jacob all night wrestling with that angel, / What did you find out?' In ALS. Seventeen lines. 'The following is a tricksy poem called Signed Copies, it comes from signing copies, well I never . . .' And after the poem: 'Read slowly, it's not so bad a second time . . . but a third?'[128] 'The silences of Sarah / (no. 2059 of an infinite series, all signed by the author. Cost nothing, much)'. Begins: 'Keeping in touch isnt half so much / A muchness, a suchness, as silence is.' On undated ACS. Fourteen lines.[129] 'The signal of Saturn'. Begins: 'To want to know, to be sure, is the signal / Of Saturn to plant one's becoming old / In a child's eyes where it may flourish / In the wilderness of youth.' On ACS dated 20 June 1984. Twelve lines. Followed by: 'Saturn is the god of old age.'[130] 'A Sort of Prayer'. Begins: 'Let there be room to love you in / Without pain, but with blessing,'. In undated ALS. Dated by SEH to 22 April 1981. Six lines. 'It only means that I love you so very much that I know how difficult it is for you - I do know, that's all.'[131] Title: 'The Story of Birnam Wood'. Begins: 'The wind works | From leaf to leaf | But out of season our boughs shall breaks.' In ACS. Undated ('Thursday 8th'). Twenty-one lines. Followed by: 'I know it's a rather enigmatic piece. Like it for its sounds, & rhythms, & half-semi-rhymes.'[132] Title: 'Times of Day'. Begins: 'Theer are these times of day / The sun cracks; slaves revolt.' In ACS with postmark 14 September 1981. Nine lines.[133] Title: 'To the Cave of Music'. Begins: ' 'They came up here to mine for it, / 'In pain & compulsion: see that / 'Slag-heap of Silence?' In ACS postmarked 14 November 1981. Six lines. Following a final reference to 'Man's / Unsingable lovesong' PD writes: 'I sing it to you.'[134] Title: 'Total Eclipse of the Moon'. First line: 'The shadow of our Earth'. In ACS dated 3 December 1986. Four lines. Followed by 'I send the melancholia that transcends all wit because I love you consumedly. | P.'[135] Title: 'The Night after Victory at Trafalgar'. First line: 'The swollen wind increased all night'. In undated ACS. Seven lines, followed by: '- Which is a mouldy poem to send you. It's what happened. I hear the herring-gulls yowk & yodel.'[136] Title: 'Unstill Life' ('or Fantasies?' added in another hand). Begins: 'Fire light, it is red, / Gold, orange, it makes shadows / Shudder & flap; you can almost / See that table's breath.' On undated ACS, dated by SEH to 7 November 1981. Savile Club letterhead. Fourteen lines. Followed by: 'You by the fire, that evening.'[137] Title: 'Waking Early'. Begins: 'How seldom one hears / Voices in dreams.' In ACS with postmark 23 July 1982. Eighteen lines. Followed by: 'This poem isnt the one I'm writing if you see what I mean. It goes back a long way.'[138] Title: 'Wild Weather | Hungry clouds swag on the deep Wm. Blake.' First line: It bucks it rears, but there astride'. In undated ACS. Eight lines.[139] Title: 'Winter'. First line: 'The sun shines on the fallen snow,'. Dated 14 February 1983. On other side of ACS dated 15 February 1983. Six lines. Followed by (poem?): 'Something, mysterious, opposite, | magical, or yet what seems to | happen & be reconciled to paying | bills, & all sorts of darknesses'.[140] Title: '2 Parts'. First line: 'Loving you twice as much'. On undated ACS (with 'Two Singers' above). Four lines. Regarding the poem's 'tennis joke' he writes: 'You must let me have my boring joke.'[141] Untitled. Begins: '. . . an extra throw of time - / A something making sense / Of it-self: call it / Equation of difference.' In undated ALS. Ten lines.[142] Untitled. Begins: 'Dear Miss Ham & dear Miss Ilton / Can I meet you at the Hilton?' On undated card, dated by SEH to November 1982. Savile Club letterhead. Ten lines.[143] Untitled. First line: 'Episcopa, the Bishop's wife,'. In ALS. Four lines.[144] Untitled. First line: 'How quickly poems fade'. In undated ALS. Twelve lines. The poem appears again, with minor differences, in another undated ALS, with two other poems.[145] Untitled. First line: 'How unbelievable when age & time collide,'. In undated ALS. Four lines.[146] Untitled. Begins: 'I have not known Time fall / Like this before, like snow.' In ALS. Twelve lines. PD adds 'You write the last line!?', and SEH has added a line and made a few emendations. PD writes: 'This isnt really a poem. I hate using imagery Ive used & Ive used snow so it's only an exercise but I thought you might like it. No keeping value. Last line shocking, not what I want. Trying to write another.'[147] Untitled. Begins: 'I like to think of you & me together / As sharing a secret chime -'. In ACS dated 12 March 1987. Four lines. He writes: 'here's a little verse I thougt of for you last night'. Following the poem: 'You see, I cant resist a sort of double meaning to make more meaning!'[148] Untitled. Begins: 'I love you as you can't love me, / The rendezvous between'. In undated ACS. Four lines.[149] Untitled. First line: 'I shall vote for Photophit,'. In undated ALS. Four line. With caricature of woman's face with glasses.[150] Untitled. Begins: 'If ever I lose you | Where would you be? Behind the waterfall | Under the sea.' In undated ('Friday 14') ALS. Eight lines. Followed by 'Reading too much poetry. I have to write a secret sort of pastiche.'[151] Untitled poem in French. First line: 'Il fait froid, trop froid.' In ALS of 16 January 1982. Six lines.[152] Untitled. Begins: 'I've nothing to do today / That cannot wait:'. In undated ALS. Nine lines. After poem: 'I like writing doggerel. I think the nearest rhyme to 'doggerel' was invented by Dylan for his Welsh village, in Under Milk Wood, Llareggub - read it backwards!'[153] Untitled. Begins: 'My medicaments are famous. / Who has not taken Vilbert's / Exclusively Universal / Pink Possets for the Gripes?' In ALS dated '5. 30. 6. . . .' Twenty-four lines. 'sat down here & longed for you & wrote some new lines Tony wants for Vilbert, all sorts of bogus medicines . . . .'[154] Untitled. First line: 'Now turn the hour-glass as we must'. In undated ALS. Four lines.[155] Untitled. Begins: 'O I am the Frog a Princess kissed, / But I didnt turn into a Prince,'. On piece of paper laid down on the back of an undated ACS. Written in green and red felt-tip pen, with illustration of a frog on a lily-pad, in green, red, blue and yellow felt-tip pen.[156] Untitled. Reads: 'Of all who have loved you I / Love you the most: / But I promise when I die / To be a considerate, independent, undemanding Ghost.' On undated ACS. Tentatively dated by SEH in pencil to 1970.[157] Untitled. First line: 'Put in your Time an hour,'. On ACS with postmark of 17 March 1983. Four lines. In Yellow felt-tip pen, with the card illustrated and written out in yellow, blue, black, green and red felt-tip pen.[158] Untitled. Begins: 'Ransomed in time, let someone keep / A god's watch on me while I sleep; / So may I be / Imprisoned in my body, yet wake free.' In ALS dated 3 September 1985. Preceded by 'Things dont go as planned. Other gods see to that, though P. A. was no mean performer.' And after the poem: 'I guess you know who pays the ransom . . .'[159] Untitled. Begins: ' 'Ripeness is all' our Master wrote, & yet / Ripeness is autumn talk, & one is set'. On one side of undated ACS, with text on other.[160] Untitled. Begins: 'Soon & Maybe | Had a baby | In a sort of loving sorrow -'. In undated ('FRI') ACS. Six lines, followed by 'Well I made this up as I wrote - it's only a squib.'[161] Untitled. Begins: 'The flat, emptiness-cold; / The objects all about / Like coins down in clear water'. In undated ALS. Nine lines. 'This little piece ought to be written in French, because I dont mean it to be portentous or doom-laden - It's just that I think of the Garden Flat, all cold'.[162] Untitled. First line: 'The 'light thickens' a sort | Of gravy congealing'. In undated ('Sat.') ALS. Four lines. Followed by 'Som'at like that. 'Light thickens' is, of course, from that great writer William Bacon de Vere Shakespeare'.[163] Untitled. Reads: 'The sending of picture postcards is | One bit of civilisation left, | Telling the truth, but giving pleasure: | Not stones | To be rolled away, it's a lift | To life - Even the dead feel lighter, | I think, in their golden bones, | Their buried treasure.' In ACS with postmark 3 August 1984. Eight lines. Followed by: 'Another doggrerel, or caterwaul.'[164] Untitled. First line: 'There is more faith in useless prayer,'. In ALS dated 12 August 1985. Four lines. Followed by: 'No, it's not a cynical parody of Tennyson.'[165] Untitled. Reads: 'There's this: our temporary / Permanence unlocks / The gates of paradise - / With keys of paradox.' In undated ALS.[166] Untitled. Begins: 'Time, like the clouds, / Seems to work in layers:' 1p, 16mo. On the other side is Item 79.[167] Untitled poem in French beginning: 'Tout seul, je suis tout seul'. In ACS with postmark 25 March 1982. Eight lines. Followed by: 'Not exactly Verlaine!'[168] Untitled. Begins: 'Where did you hide, and why / You other 59? / Misprints can multiply / And change & terrify.' In undated ALS. Twenty lines. Preceded by: 'I realise that my capital Gs G & often just G can be mistaken for the number 6 can be misprinted (twice) / So to GO hidden is to 60 hidden'. After the poem: 'I like making 'somethings' out of 'nothings.' One never knows which is which.'[169] Untitled. First line: ' Why did you ring? you asked -'. At beginning of undated ACS, with cutting of illustration of two cherubs pasted on at the head. Four lines.[170] Untitled. Begins: 'Yes, Misery makes you feel a stone's / Got in your shoe, you shake it out:'. In undated ALS with the next and one other poem. Four lines.[171] Untitled. Begins: 'Yet, till that point we met / We went singly about, / Wholly unknown to each other.' In undated ALS with the last and one other poem. Ten lines.Also present is the text of a poem by PD, not in his hand:Title: '80th.' First line: 'NOW THAT I'M INTO MY 8OTH | I ABSOLVE, exonerate, forgive | Time for the little I've done or not:'. At end (again not in PD's autograph): 'P. D. | 24th January, 1994.' 1p, 12mo. Sixteen lines.And three typed and unattributed poems. The first is titled 'This time, next time . . . .' Twenty-three lines, beginning 'Walking through time together / As if the stairway down the cliff / Were a Mozart phrase, as if / The stone-built store and the net-shed'. The second is untitled, and begins 'Timp Harrison Chert, poor Timp Harrison Chert / Is far too attentive a driver to flirt;'. Twenty-four lines with note: 'This name is an anagram of the name Patric Horner Smith to whom some verses were addressed which are referred to in the last verse here. Timp is apparently how the Rev Timothy Beaumont abbreviates himself'. Pencil note by PD: 'which is itself an anagram'. The third is headed 'A poem for William Langland who was born under the shadow of the Malvern Hills, educated at the Priory, and who wrote The Vision of Piers Plowman'. 1p, foolscap 8vo. Thirty-five lines. A photocopy of a calligraphic version of this poem is in Section 5 below.C. Printed keepsake poemsEleven printed keepsakes. Items 1-7 by PD, the rest by others.[1] By 'Patric Dickinson'. Title: 'Autumn'. First line: ' 'Ripeness is all' our Master wrote and yet'. Printed on beige card, with stamped ACS from PH, postmarked 18 November 1982.[2] By 'P. D.' Title: 'A Dancing Star'. First line: 'Well, yes, it must be so.' Printed on grey card. On the reverse is an ACS from SD ('Sheila'): 'I remember so vividly when Patric & I watched the star from our cottage door in Cumberland - leaning on the stone wall & looking across the valley to the line of hills.'[3] By 'P. D.' Title: 'The First Snow Shower'. First line: 'This shower was a first foray as yet'. Printed on cream card, with ACS from SD ('Sheila'), dated 9 February 2001: 'This poem appeared first in the Wintering Tree - I remember the magical frost P. describes, so vividly. Christmas in Northumberland in the snow - was just such a magical time this year.'[4] By 'P. D.' Title: 'New Year'. First line: 'Now turn the hour-glass as we must,'. Printed on green card. With ANS from SD ('Sheila'), dated December 1999.[5] By 'P. D.' Title: 'OH! / To a grandchild: written in reply'. First line: 'Clouds blow, quick and slow,'. Printed on green card. Inscribed ny SD ('Sheila') on reverse.[6] [By 'P. D.'] Title: '1988'. First line: 'O may the cocks of New Year's Day'. Printed on green card, with long ACS from PD, dated 11 October 1988.[7] Another copy of '1988', with ANS by PD: 'With all our love | S & P'.Items 8 to 11 are Mandeville Press keepsake poems by other authors.[8] By Katharine Middleton. Title: 'Some cold night'. First line: 'Alone on some long cold night,'. 1979. Printed on grey card, with unsigned pencil note by PD.[9] By John Mole. Title: 'Carillon'. First line: 'Five bells all and all bells sing'. 1982. Printed on red card. With ANS by PD, stamped and postmarked 10 November 1984.[10] Another copy of 'Carillon' by John Mole. With undated ANS by PD.[11] By George Szirtes. Title: 'Dialogue for Christmas'. 'This white year arrives and leaves'. 1982. Printed on mustard card, with ACS by PD.3. Autograph criticism[1] Autograph Review of the book 'Andrew Young The Poetical Works | ed Edward Lowbury & Alison Young | Secker & Warburg ?12.95'. [1985] Begins: 'Andrew Young was born 1885 & died at a ripe old age in 1971.' Ends: 'There is every reason to praise this peculiar, original, cold Scot with his Roman visage & bright blue eyes - but for what he is. That takes some discovering, but is entirely worth it.' On reverse photocopy of typescript of 'Anon' poem beginning: ''Open the door! Who's there within?'[2] Holograph 'Introduction' to an anthology of poems. Apparently unpublished. A 'rather long preamble to explain - or excuse? - my choice'. 2pp, foolscap 8vo. Sixty-five closely written lines of text, signed at end, 'Patric Dickinson'. With a couple of minor autograph emendations. The following extract, starting from the beginning, accounts for less than a quarter of the whole: 'There is a good but much over-anthologised poem by Edward Thomas called Adlestrop. It is the name of a wayside railway station where an express train (pre-1914) has been halted. No-one, of course, gets on or off: | [quotes the last four lines of the poem] | That station was closed nearly twenty years ago. The name-boards were sold, I seem to remember, to an admirer of Edward Thomas, now famous as never in his shortish lifetime. No doubt, though, the generations of birds go on singing. Often, as I wait on our mercifully unclosed station, I hear a thrush sing. I think of E. T. & hear farther & farther all the birds of Kent & Sussex. Without labouring the metaphor, I hope, Adlestrop is the anthologist's position.' On the reverses of the two leaves are photocopies of typescripts of poems title 'Deer' and 'A Lament for the Music-Maker | Sean O Riada 1930-1971'. In the respective top-right corners are 'No. 1889 | D. W. Smith' and 'No. 1900 | D. W. Smith'.[3] Autograph pencil response, apparently to a book of poems inspired by Elizabeth Smart (lent to him by SEH and PD's response addressed to her?). Unsigned. No date. 1p, 12mo. Begins: 'It's difficult, when one had read By Grand Central Station when it came out. It's more difficult knowing, or having known, Elizabeth Smart, personally. | These poems, to me, have all kinds of the notes one would make into poems, to be written. | I find these poems to be 'notes-for-poems.' they rely on 'I' - & if you dont know who Elizabeth Smart is, who is this 'I.'? | The actual poems are not so much E. Smart as Stevie Smith, I feel. | BUT they're very pleasant & have good things said. They're not original like yours are.'4. Typescripts[1] Corrected annotated typescript, with alternative title, of PD's poetry collection 'The Cold Universe' (1964). No name, details or title-leaf. 39pp, 4to. On the rectos of 39 leaves, attached at one corner with a stud. Text entirely clear and complete. Lightly aged and worn, with cover leaf detached. Unpaginated, but with pencil note at foot of each poem of the page on which it appears. The title of the poem 'No Room' has been added in ink, with the original title 'POEM IN ABSENCE' scored through. There are also two substantive changes to that poem. Similarly, the last word of the poem title 'FIND OUT MOONSHINE' has been scored through, to give the published title 'FIND OUT'. In pencil on page with first poem 'PROTEUS': 'N.B. Print Prometheus from overleaf on same page as this please.' On same page, presumably presenting the typescript to SEH: 'SEH / PTD / For no-one but you.' Similar notes regarding the printing on the same page of 'ON THE MAP' and 'TIME'S NORTH', and 'MAIDEN MOOR' and 'A RIDDLE'.[2] Unpublished typed playscript: 'THE GOLDEN TOUCH / A Love Story' (no author, but by PD). Undated [1959]. Autograph ownership inscription at bottom-right of first page: 'Patric Dickinson / 38 Church Sq. / Rye.' Damaged label of PD's agents Curtis Brown on front cover. [3] + 123pp, 4to. Typed in blue and red on rectos only. A few autograph emendations. The play is set in England in 1947. It was produced in Wolverhampton in 1959, but was never published. On lightly aged and worn paper, in damaged binding, but complete and entirely clear.[3] Earlier draft of PD's 1965 memoir 'The Good Minute', with significant variations. Autograph title-page: 'The Good Minute. / An Autobiographical Study. / Patric Dickinson / 38 Church Sq. / Rye / Sx.' In typed at end (p.414): 'For Sheila Shannon / Patric Dickinson / March 24th, 1964.' [1] + 414pp, 4to. On rectos only. Held together by three string sections with rusted tags. Last leaf creased and torn but with text entirely legible, otherwise lightly worn and aged. An earlier draft of the book published in London in 1965 by Victor Gollancz. The published version was largely recast. To give three instances out of the many: PD's comment on p.7 of the typescript introducing a quotation from Edward Thomas has been deleted: 'but as so often with my memory I could see the words on the page, their exact setting, but was not sure of perfect quotation.', as is what follows on p.8: 'I can verify these words. But in all that follows I cannot be sure of perfect quotation.' A four-and-a-half page passage (pp.117-121) at the end of Chapter Four of the typescript has been reduced to a single half-page paragraph in the published version. (The deleted passage begins 'During the war when I was in a state of deep-private desolation' and ends 'Already I was feeling the hot solid terrible darkness outside the bed in which I was going to lie, beyond wakefulness, or sleep, for the footsteps and the rattling and the knocks.') And the following indiscreet passage on p.278 has been deleted: 'We were very happy in this lunatic limbo, being instucted how to use weapons so out of date you looked at your penis and wondered if it was Mark I or II. I found out that the Field Chalice was outdated and that the Blood of the Lamb was not worthy of Mark II. I found out seriously, not as a Betjeman joke.' And the published version omits a sentence on p.299 describing what PD did with his disability pension: 'I immediately spent it in the bar of the Great Western Hotel, which I used almost as a club.' And on p.339, the first paragraph of the epilogue (beginning: 'As I approach the back of the mirror a greater crowd of persons and events clamours to be let through.') is not present in the published version.[5] Untitled 'bulletin' by 'Patric Dickinson' for the 'P[oetry]. B[ook]. S[ociety].' 2pp, 4to. Begins: 'When last I wrote for this bulletin - Winter 1964 - it was not only to express my pleasure at being the 'Choice'; it was also a valediction for Joe Compton, who had just died. But I go back to the very beginnings of the P.B.S. ten years before. We often talked about it. He and Eric Walter White, particularly, strove and succeeded in this perilous and now steadfast venture. To be chosen as a 'Recommendation' 18 years later therefore gives me a particular pleasure.'[5] 'The Living Poet / Patric Dickinson'. Date of rehearsal and pre-recording 14 October 1964. [1] + 13pp, foolscap 8vo. With BBC compliments slip.[6] 'Anthology / by / Patric Dickinson'. Dated in pencil to 29 December 1964. [1] + 21pp, 4to. Talk by 'P. D.', with poems recited by 'READER'. In pencil by PD at top right of first page: 'The music is for ever now / You sitting listening to it & / asking for it again'.[7] 'ONE HOUR'. Undated (but with reference to 'autumn 1962'. 30pp, foolscap 8vo. Talk by 'DICKINSON', with four 'VOICES'. Includes discussion on golf by PD: 'To me golf is an enchantment: an examination into the recesses of personality. [...] When I play golf I play the Eumenides. [...]' A few pencil annotations by PD, and ink ones in another hand. Referred to in SEH's letter to Piers Plowright, quoted in Section 5 below.[8] 'HAPPINESS: PATIC DICKINSON'. Headed 'CHECKED IN TALKS DEPARTMENT WITH 'AS BROADCAST' SCRIPT / WOMAN'S HOUR PRODUCER: SHIRLEY DU BOULAY.' No transmission date. 3pp, foolscap 8vo. Some pencil annotations.5. Miscellaneous materialBundle of miscellaneous material, including a wallet containing twelve photographs (eight of them of PD), letters and postcards from various individuals (including Piers Plowright and Ursula Vaughan-Williams), drafts, programmes, newspaper cuttings and photocopies. Also two mock-ups of an unusued cover for PD's 'The Good Minute' (Gollancz, 1965)0o: 'Jacket by Sarah Hamilton & Partners. / Printed by Direct Art Services.' A carbon of a letter from SEH to Piers Plowright, written on 16 March 2017 makes mournful reading: 'My reason for writing is that I was going through trunks of letter, books etc. prior to probably moving again when I came across the type script of One Hour that you produced with Patric at 38 Church Sq. I also have a multitude of letters from him & Sheila & lots of books of his plays & poetry with pencil notes in many, posters with John Ward etc. I thought some of these would be of interest to a university, writing or poetry grou & am trying to raise interest to sell them. Rye library has none of his works, Waterstones who took over the bookshop in the High St where they had his launches never heard of him, & a 2nd hand bookshop by the church had a few they couldn't sell! However a new bokshop here in St Leonards is taking some samples to a book fair soon & suspects having a display of his work in their shop beside St. L. station to rekindle interest in this local poet.'There are six photocopies of poems by PD:[1] Magazine cutting of poem. Title: 'Not Hereafter'. First line: 'It isn't fear of death I find'. Cutting dated in pen 12 February 1989. Attached to undated ALS (on back of handbill advertisement for his 1988 Mandeville Press collection 'The Sun Dog'), in which PD writes: 'There's a poem, I dont think youve seen, in The Spectator today. I was persuaded to hawk one or two round, which I havent for years, & Ive been lucky!'[2] Photocopy of poem. Title: 'Generations'. Reads: 'I might survive | As an echo, a whisper, | A whispering echo, an echoing whisper | You didnt quite catch: | O dear ones, listen | While you live your lives; | Latch onto this very [sic, for 'verse'?] every morning | A way of loving and leaving | You can teach the unborn.' Unsigned and undated, but with note by SEH: 'recd. 23/9/89. SH.' 1p, 12mo. Nine lines.[3] Photocopy of poem. Title: 'For S E'. Begins: 'Wild moth, so vulnerable, | I am that candle | You must never light: | I will stay, keep me beside you, | So longing to be lit, | I will stay, I will stay. | Just let me be lit, the few | Calm moment before you sleep, | then blow me out.'[4] Photocopy of poem. Title: 'A Place'. First line: 'When Mortal & Eternal mate,'. Unsigned and undated. 1p, landscape 12mo. Eleven lines.[5] Photocopy of poem. Title: 'Reform'. First line: 'As one gets older & more infirm'. On reproduction of conclusion of ALS. 'recd 1/8/92'. Four lines.[6] 'Great Malvern Priory / 1085-1985' by 'Patric Dickinson'. Full-page thirty-five line poem in calligraphic display, beginning 'O William Langland, whoever you were'. There is a typescript of this poem in Section 2 above.6. Correspondence from his wife to his mistress, 1966-200219 Autograph Letters Signed (a total of 18pp in 8vo and 25pp in 12mo) and 14 Autograph Cards Signed. Most signed 'Sheila', some signed 'S' and one 'Sheil'. Most sent from Rye, and one from Italy. Written in a guarded and seemingly-affectionate tone throughout (one is addressed to 'My own dearest Sarah'). On 21 March 1992: 'This is not the moment to ask you to do anything extra - especially sorting out papers which may still be at Regents Park - but the problem is this. It's a nice problem really. John Bell, who used to work with the O.U.P. & is now long retired & has been a dear friend of ours for many years, has a hand press which is his pride & joy, & he produces, for friends, small books every now & again. He wants to do a little volume of Patric's unpublished poems - about 30 or so & has asked me if I can provide them. Unfortunately - owing to my horrid eye trouble & the fact that P. did not keep MSS books but usually left poems in faint pencil on scraps of paper, it's going to be difficult for me to find 30 finished poems, good enough to publish - without a lot of delay. But when P. had finished a poem to his satisfaction he wd. ask me to go acrosss to the Library to take 2 or 3 copies - one of which he usually marked to send to you. Stupidly, I didn't take an extra copy for myself - thinking the originals would be here & we would have time to collect them, & when we had enough, to try to get a new book published. We never did.' On 12 September 1997 she writes of a female critic: 'I cant believe she's ever written a poem or loved a poet or lived with one . . .' With a print-out (4pp, foolscap 8vo) of 'SHEILA DICKINSON / [Address given in Rye Monday 4th November 2002]', a funeral address by PD's radio producer Piers Plowright, sent to SEH by PD's daughter-in-law ('from Ginny'). With carbons of four letters from SEH to Sheila Dickinson: one undated the othes from 1963, 1965 and 1994. The last three are long, while the shortest, written on 5 May 1963, comes across as somewhat two-faced: 'Dearest Sheila - / I know you are always surrounded by love, but if ever you should need me for anything at all you know you have a very faithful & loving friend just round the corner about 5 mins away. Thinking of you very often & always very near. / My love to you / Your Sarah.' At foot: 'Key to Bedf. Sq.' Also present is the earliest item in the collection, a carbon of a closely-written long letter from SEH to PD, 5 May 1961. 1p, 8vo. The letter is gushing, but does not betray any sign of a romantic involvement.7. Extracts from correspondence, 1962-2003A. BBCCard postmarked 29 March 1985: 'I performed on BBC 5x. y'day. The first live (& unscripted) b'cast for well over 20 years & it seemed totally unreal!!! I couldn't believe there were actual people (most, I expect, in the kitchens of 5x.) listening! I wish I cd. see you. Toujours je t'aime et t'aimerais. Your rival girlfriend writes to me more often, but then she is a mere 85, & asks me searching questions abt. contemp. American poetesses among other things, people.'2 March 1989: 'Ive seen Piers & met the R3 controller, who I liked a lot. It takes a long time for things to happen chez BBC, and after that dreary palace revolution, even longer, but I think things will happen actually - happen by September - I may get some work! And by Sept . . . A whole lot will have happened.'22 September 1989: 'I dont imagine you'll be in at 4.30 next Tues. If you are, there's a prog. on BBC called a Dragon's Print. It is about the role of Peter Scupham & John Mole as printers (the Mandeville Press) & they are filmed setting-up A Sun Dog! Heaven knows what it'll be like, but it might be fun.'14 April 1990: 'That was such an especially lovely evening! I havent written because I hoped to give good news, but the BBC swithers so, & at last having said a No, they then ask for something else! Signs hopeful, but no YES yet. [...] When (if) Piers & R3 make up their minds I shall feel a different being. You being there is so wonderful & consoling & sustaining. I clumsily said things I feel - the unsaid are better far. Say them to yourself for me.''Was in Bristol, [...] The next two days were in the studio mostly, but working with Jill & Ronald (Pickup) is so marvellous & stimulating. They are, in their way, the best possible. How lucky I am to have had people like them! I speak my own little narration bits to someone I love. It helps me. I think the 4 programmes went well too.''My birthday prog, I gather, is to be b'cast actually on it. It is to be recorded in Bristol, on 4th Dec. I could come on Dec 3 for a quick visit @ lunchtime??'B. Bourfell'About fifteen years ago on a gray hot clammy day we were all up Mosedale; & now or never, well, I suddenly said 'I will climb Bour Fell' - it's quite a high one, a beautiful pyramidal shape. What I never told you, or anyone till now, is that I had one of those polyphotos of you, & I hid it under a big stone on the top. I look up to it from here. You must think me such a silly romantic. I look up somewhere I shall not be again. My love for you is longer, older, stronger to give now, & I do hope more sensible darling E. [...] When I was ill, 2 years ago, I thought over my very lucky life. I had every thing. How could I be so selfish as to ask more? I confess I did, & you know I did. Your ringing on my birthday was, for me, a secret message summoning me back to life. You will never know, they say, but you do know what you gave me. It was [Greek], a gift for ever. I think of you so, here, in this ancient, present, indestructable landscape. [...] I still feel as if, being reprieved, I am immortal - but I am not. I want to fill the rest of my life & miss no giving of love that is in me. For Sheila. For you. For one or two more . . . | You are you - special - to me, oh darling one - do you see? you are so true, so real, so tender & gentle, I need you to need me - does that make sense? I too, you know, am horribly sensitive - & that caused me to lose you. I wont, ever again. | I love you. love you now in that Garden (of Eden)? flat. You are, too, & left-over nymph from Delphi or Olympos; your room is magic to share, & when you climb that ladder it is to go out of the world. Do you know that little engraving of Blake's - a ladder tapering up to a star with the caption 'I want! I want!' Are you sleepint better? | It was by chance, too, I find I'm writing again on a bit of Fates! Isnt it strange to think that I read the Owen sonnet before you were born, my dear darling - yet I dont feel elder.'Card written just after her return from a trip to Peru. 'I expect, you'll be jet-lagged & there are lots of people you'll want to see, & piles & piles of post. But just think, there's no-one I shall want to see more than you. Ive loved you so long, you're a part of me. I know I cant be as much a part of you, but I dont mind. I looked up at Bourfell & once, nearly 20 years ago, I climbed it & put a polyphoto of you under a cairn on the top. Now I can only look, & it's still there for me & I love you by 25 years more & will, in what I've got left. I managed quite a bit of walking[.] I'm much better. Cumberland was heavenly & God knew it, for all the week was fine & sunny & shiny.'C. His character'I suppose all my worst traits spring from my 1/2 Irish blood, yet my mother was wonderful & true & supremely good & utterly un-Irish. Yet she was proud & austere too. And when she said Remember, you have kings' blood in your veins (Galway pirates' or robbers') it was an admonishment to be good & just & . . .'.'I think we are easily hurt people, both of us, but I can tell you NEVER GIVE IN, & you might give me a kiss. I shall never give in, I can tell you. Never. | It wasn't a proper poem I sent, but I had to send you something. Please, you mustnt mind my outpourings - I do love you so, & I'm no sledgehammer, but I'm sure you know, anyway a bit. | One is so unconfident. If I am a professor read that poem The Professor, again.'''Yes I'm a worrier, but also a terrier. I hold on. | Phew! It is hot again & again. Lots of Peacock butterflies have hatched. I forget, is there a buddleia in your gdn? Hope so. Life, he moaned, still continues to maltreat his (fairly) faithful servant. Nonsense! says Life, havent you just had a poem written in 1945 b'cast in Australia? Havent you got a R[3?] tomorrow of a not quite so aged Sequences? Havent you got Sarah to love? Stop moaning & get on with it - you're alive, you know S is flat out, dont be so selfish! Do you hear me? Yes, but oh . . . No! Get on & love her. So I do, so I will. | Beloved. | P.'D. Chester SquareAfter a visit with her to '50 Ch[ester]. [Square]' in Pimlico: It's so strange to think that I worked there, & that I opened the door to the King of Norway & had a snack lunch with Dr Benes, president of, invaded, Ceskoslavia, [sic] quite by chance, & just talked - & it's so, so long ago & that I met S. in Ch[ester] [Square] for the first time, & met you on the only own doorstep I'll ever have. I do so hope - & goodness knows - one prays to all sorts of gods & goddesses - immortals who yet live in Time - I do so hope I'm not too trying. There are times when I - we - wake in the same bed & for all the inextinguishable till-death-do-us-part love, I confess to a longing that it were you, to myself | I'll have a gap: now read on. I dont think Im being treacherous, I think I'm being selfish & demanding to Sarah Hamilton. Forgive me, please. | Sometimes I have fantasies that it is you. Do not think I am jealous: I am envious of all those, not so many either. It's not wrong, I am a man, I could still beget. Dr Price did at 91. | One's thoughts, longings, desires, hopes are still based on the idea - for thousands of years, that man doesnt die & the wheat seeds in Tutankhamen's tomb did germinate.''It is fantastic how Chester Sq is recurrent! I have bored you, I know, but the pattern persists. I first set eyes - & ears - on Sheila there. I was broadcasting (live) my first big feature (about Ernest Dowson too) while David was beginning & that kind & dear actor Andrew Cruikshank took me back to their house in Chester SQ & calmed & comforted, so that I went back to Cheyne House, & slept, & the telephone woke me to say D. was safely born & Brian & Josephine Barnes (now Sir, & Dame & alas divorced) they lived in Chester Sq! Josephine I could say Josefiend was then S's specialist.'E. Envy'I hope you wont mind what I need & want to say. You know I think of you a very great deal. I cant understand - having now met both children - how & why Roger cannot get on w. his wife or vice-versa. I can understand, I think, why Roger indulges himself in his weekly psychiatrist. It shocks but does not surprise me that he seems to blab everything. These shrinkers, [sic] as the Americans call them, are lay-priests but without the absolute silence of the confessional. It's a bit hard you get the play-bac: but, of course, Roger is jealous. (Ive tried to tell you the distinction between Envy & Jealousy.) If you dont sleep with him any more, he will be even more Jealous. Only tell me, or not. I have loved you for so long, & till I die, that my thoughts & my hear go out to you, always. I only wish you had met me (or a sort of me, a creative creature) in time & not a rift. Of course men want to possess those they love. But, like Jim, like Roger it seems to me they are the wrong kind of men. They'd show you off. You are beautiful yes, but it's the essence, the being you, that matters. Giving is what the likes of us do, not possessing or being possessed. You must be lonely, & I am wholly glad you have found Val. I dont think many men would be; & it is not because, as you once said, You've got Sheila We have each other. I have given myself to you. We cannot ever have each other. I can only give you a book. This doesnt mean that sometimes I long for your physical presence. One does. Oh darling one, let's talk as soon as poss. I'm arrogant enough to think you need my love. I need yours. | P.'In 1980: 'One really must, now, be a world-class runner like the White Queen or Sebastian Coe to keep in the same place, or not slowly lose ground. | Look, dear one, it is not in human nature (not in mine, anyway,) not to want to see more of you. I've loved you for jolly nearly 20 years, & love you I will till I die. But I dont think I've got another 20 years - doddering old fool of 86 - that's why sometimes I want to seize time, wring it out, iron it out, & say you-&-I.'F. Family'we are in the midst of a visit from Cousin Jim & his wee Jean wife. He is S's cousin. I admit to no extant cousins. But I can tell you if I had one as BORING, WORTHY, BORING (as only ex-schoolmasters can be) I would be tempted to put Paraquat in his sherry. I wouldn't do it, but at least it'd stop him talking talking about 3rd cousins 5th removed & telling us almost word for word the whole plot of Priestley's The Linden Tree, all the parts, (Jim the lead) & to have it all once is too much, & today is twice, & they dont GO till after lunch tomorrow . . . Oh, well . . . there seem now to be Awards for almost everything. I reckon Jim wins the Gold Enuie, which is made of lead.'Undated card ('READ THIS SLOWLY & CAREFULLY'): 'Darling Sweet-tot - How lovely it was! Thank you. I so love being with you & talking, & eating [sic] the RETSINA. You know I love you & have for over 25 years. Bless you for putting up with me! I feel so utterly tranquil w. you, love me as you may & can, but its such friendship & understanding too. I value it beyond anything. I can tell you, say, about our d[aughter]-in-l[aw]., in a way I cant tell S. (though I suspect she is with me) BUT - there is our David & 2, about-to-be 3 - children - so one has to go on day to day. I know I could say anything. I didn't last evening, because I felt too happy & we were in an envelope of just happily being together a sense of a free kind of security & ease & love.'Complains of a 'rather a boring week of unexpected turners-uppers'Several reference to his son David's farm in Newbridge: 'David's lambing is over - no worse than that of any of the other farmers round here, but a gruelling one to start on. Of our two pairs of sock lambs Maxius & Publius, & Marie & Celeste, poor Celeste went back to the farm full of life, then suddenly picked up some violent virus & was dead in 24 hours. H?las!' 'Lambing is in full swing & going average to well. D[avid]. always hopes for 1000 lambs & will get about 850 - Some ewes get lost.' 18 September 1990: 'D. has made such a success of Newbridge too - it's in the black! - & how many farmers are?'G. First meeting30 December 1982: 'My dear darling, | I wonder when I first wrote to you, & if I started Dear Sarah? It must have been to Bedford Avenue. I used to come, usually with a bottle of sherry . . . The shop's gone now. I must have written you thousands of letters since. Here's the last - for 1982! No, this isn't going to be a chronicle of time past, though I remember a lot of it, starting with a beautiful girl on the doorstep - a poem I havent written (yet) | I have never thanked you enough for your sweetness & scrupulousness. Being in love & loving can be different, or be together. With me, they are together. Sheila's always known so, & you have always been so generous & sweet & I know she loves you, too. So, thank you. | You have made a wonderful added dimension to my life. When I truly believed you had dismissed me (at the bus stop 1/2 way down Park Lane) I was more utterly miserable than if you'd been dead. To have you come back is a miracle - & I say selfishly given to me poems better than ever I could have written without you. Bless & thank you for that too.''My dearest darling one | I lay awake for long intervals last night thinking of you & loving you. It's more than 20 years since a girl with a key stood on the step. I'm Sarah Hamilton she said - & though I didn't know it; my life was changed for as a long as I live. Yours was, too, though I hope not so much. You know you have my love for ever, you have my poems too. More than a key was lost & found You know you always can come here. It gave me such delight to see you & S[heila]. together. You have both been so good to me, so dear & loving & understanding. Bless & thank you. [...] How I longed to creep into the nursery & kiss your darling head a goodnight & not wake you. How I longed to kiss you good-morning. Sometimes it is almost unendurable for me. It was heavenly though, & I almost believed that if I crept into the nursery last night you'd have been there. Yes, you are there; & here; but the diet of imagination is sparse. I'm glad I stay more or less as I am. Forgive my longings.'H. Friends and acquaintances' Hullo, poet Ralph Richardson used to say to me at the Savile, Scribble, scribble, scribble I suppose - so enclosed is another scribble from your poet.''Ive been re-reading Sean Day-Lewis's biography of Cecil, it's boring & full of animosity & I cant think why - except that Jill gave a warm & touching interview on her relationship with her father. Micky did really threaten to horsewhip Cecil on the steps of the club - Did I ever tell you of the reconciliation dinner - me, Lady B Jill & C - Micky's dinner was a large whisky & a piece of bread & butter...''Kit (Fry) [i.e. the playwright Christopher Fry] has just sent us his new (radio) play. It is beautiful: a vision of gentleness & human dignity. Would you like to read it? It is a marvellous tender spiritual refreshment: man ought to be like this.'Of Quentin Bell and Virginia Woolf: 'Heh! What d'you think, if you've got one, of the advt. for Quentin's memorial plate for V. W.'s centenary? Me, I no like, but I suppose Americans will - a mere ?95! No, I wouldnt pay not to have it, but it's no more like V. W than V W (i.e. Vaughan Williams) Q. B. is a very hit-&-miss creature.'In 1980 PD gives an account of the 1980 funeral of his friend the publisher Ian Parsons (of Chatto & Windus), beginning: 'I have an Ms book into which I paste poems I'm going to read for occasions, ever one like this, & I kept your letter in it. It helped. A crematorium chapel is a grim place. I had not realised that Ian's coffin would be wheeled up the aisle to the chancel & that it would be just at my back. But I had said Good bye to him here [at '38 Ch Sq.'], looking out to sea & at lunchtime. I was able to slip away into his study. It's a comfort to me to visualise a place. | Trekkie [Parson's wife and the 'chaste' lover of Leonard Woof] was marvellously brave. Peggy (Ashcroft) was a superb stay. She is a dear (we've known her for ages but she was a very close friend of I. & T.) After it was over she flew to me, outside, & hugged me & told me, without saying, both that she knew how awful it had been, & that I had done it all right.'17 May 1982: 'The sibaritic life goes on. Drinks on Jonathan Raban's boat . . . another private view (only Bagley's but plonk flowing) . . . Pimm's in the gdn. before lunch: crab mayonaise); Scallops & asparagus in view for sup . . .'More about Trekkie Parsons: 'A letter came y'day from Trek. I do beg you, please never never never say to anyone, except me. Out of it fluttered a cheque towards my eye. (She's just sold Vanessa's [i.e. Bell] portrait of Virginia [Woolf]) & this is some of the proceeds. The Anti-Anxiety (Rye Branch) Society cant yet believe its generosity.''news from Rye: well, M-n-d had another collapse & was carted off to St Helens on Mon; is said to be mending. Some pretty shifty antiquery-junkery people who bought Martin Evans's house opposite the U. in E. St have been tied-up, & robbed by (I'd say) the same sort of too-close-to-the-windy-side-of-the-law people. But it's disturbing. Luckily china is difficult to steal & Dickson keeps what money he has in the Bank. If robbers took up our floorboards, they'd find the dust of ages - & not gold at that!''Dame Helen Gardner (the old mean cow - how I wish I could say it straight, but it'll come out by implication)''I've had a charming letter fr. my co-reader @ Stratford P. J. Kavanagh & I will bring you his poems to read. They are really good!''You know, every time I walk fr. the Savile to the BBC I stop & look at Epstein's Madonna & Child. It is inviolably beautiful.''No good actor Ive ever known is late for rehearsal & people - without name-dropping - I can call Ralph & John & Peggy are meticulous.' (i.e. Richardson, Gielgud and Ashcroft)'I'm seeing Basil Wright @ the club. I havent seen him for years. He once (we are friends of 30 years or more) said I've got a nephew who writes poetry. It turned out to be Lawrence!'Socialising: 'We go to Cin on Tues, as a post to strike for Eton on Weds . . . & return Thurs possibly lunch w. Jill (Balcon; Day-Lewis) & so home.'On 12 August 1985: 'I know you didn't care much for Laurence Sail, but I do, & things have been happening to him almost as blench-worthy as Thos. Hardy made happen to Jude. Unlike Hardy they're not ending but a calm period till something else looms.'H. Golf12 March 1990: 'Nearly 40 years ago I wrote a book called A Round of Golf Courses. (long o. o. p.) A fortnight ago Tony Reavell of the Martello Bookshop rang: did I know that it was to be reissured as a paperback in April in a Classics of Golf series by A & C Black? No I didnt!! Staggered, I went into this, & by sleuthing have discovered that all is above board & somebodies thought somebody else was telling me. No-one did! And I am to be paid for it! And Im a Classic!!! Nonsense, but nice!''Tonight believe it, may you, can you? We go to a party with GOLFERS - I hope I'll recognise them, & vice versa -'.I. Health17 March 1986: 'It's still so cold & fog-ridden. One feels in a doldrum. I feel I shall never see you. It's so long - too long. I know about post-'flu depression, & try to offset it, but every so often it envelops & rolls over one. I expect it's because I feel so flaccid & inert, & can't bring myself to face the work I am so far behind with. Be gone, dull care!'12 April 1989, before a cataract operation: 'Darling Dearest | Ive loved you since first I set eyes on you, you know it, & it's a long long time & now my eyes are going out, but my love for you isnt.'1 May 1992: 'Darling S. E. | You are the sweetest & most beloved person in the world to me (bar one). It's hell growing old & clapped out.'21 May 1992: 'I cant hear a word the tots say anyway!'5-6 December 1993 he reports: 'My 11-pills-a-day regime at least keeps me where I am, mostly in a chair, or the bed! The breathlessness is v. trying & rather exhausting but I say to myself what can you expect? - you're amazingly lucky to be rising 79 & with a wife of 80 - & both with faculties pretty intact.''I sat by the fire. I thought I wrote to you. Did I? Later, I fell very deep asleep - was only wakened by S. tapping me on the knee. My mind a complete blank. I couldnt remember (I still cant) if I wrote, if I posted . . . It's shaming & awful. I could find no trace of a half-done letter but I simply cant recall . . . Senility, post-'flu feebleness, the bitter cold. I can remember what I wanted to tell you, ask you how you were, but did I do it, or only think it? It's shocking & shaking.''Well, I've got new ear-trumpets which will, but dont yet, improve my fading hearing. Ive got new specs, which do immensely improve my sight, & another cataract is staved off for at least 6 months. Good. My rhinitis goes on but I see another E.N.T. consultant in a 14night. Sorry to be a hypochondriac bore. End.'Card in a late shaky hand ('I am so immobile now'), suggesting a meeting, incongruously signed by him 'S & P'J. Letter writing27 August 1988: 'It was so good to hear you! I think when one is in a semi-state, half-well-half-whatever-not, one gets into (maybe maudlin) longings to hear, to see. So get soon to a pillarbox, write one word, if you havent a stamp, dont mind. I know, too, you are a telephoner, me a writer. Never mind. Lady M. Rd. demands.''Do you find this postal strike just sort of makes a hole? Apart from being owed about ?300 by the BBC, but it's not that sort of hole - its a limbo-hole. You cant remember when you told what. So forgive, if I bore or recap.'In one card he acknowledges a 'lovely whirligig of a letter' from her. Another card starts: 'how dare I beg you to write more often, when I say tomorrow you'll get a proper letter & tomorrow comes, & you dont?'Regarding his practice of recyclying postcards, by sticking a large white sticker over the witten side. Card with postmark 13 December 1982: 'I sent this to you in May 1966, & you sweetly kept it for me. Keep it again, if you will. I feel, - why do I feel? - rather falling out of the sky - As you'll see - you have seen this marvellous piece This p.c. cost 3d to send then! & if Ive done something awful I wot not of - do say. I cant write tomorrow or Weds. A blessed rest for you? Maybe not this week. Fill the gap. I feel so cold. Speak dearest universe.' (The label is coming away, and you can see some text in PD's autograph on the original card.)And on same theme, on card with 1983 postmark: 'If you read under the sticker, it's a Ch. Card fr. a brilliant Chinese scholar chum of mine. The sort of linguist for whom languages run out. I hope this gets to you before I do.'K. Arranging liaisons'Sheila & Averil go to Dieppe' and 'Mr Ades starts redecorating the drawing-room': 'I am supposed to be going to the Savile for the duration!. S. doesn't know, & please don't let on, that I'm NOT going. I am in the midst of Piers-P series, my books are here, & I cannot afford (a) to get on, & b) to spend lots of cash. Alas! But you wont be around, & I dont love any members of the Savile. So be careful. I dont want, ever, to spoil things either for her going or coming back. I dont know how you're placed? If there were a day in the week you could come over, or ring, it'd be so lovely. | I shall be living either in the Gdn. room or the attic, near tel. & after Ades goes, have the house to myself. | I dont want to sound anything like conspiratorial'. The card ends: 'I dont go in for baby worship, unless . . . & this is where I stop. Ive told you how lonely I feel. 'Tis so.''Well, there's a good Greek verb [aporeo] - it means I am at a loss or I just don't know[.] So, did you ever get my little book - or are you in Spain or Yugoslavia or what? So I thought that while Sheila is at the Imp. War Museum, being lushed up - she has a poem in a new anthol. of women poets of the 2nd WW - I might have come up, too. Helas! On Sat is to be the unveiling at the Rye Art Gal. of me. I think you know I think that John's picture is 1st Cl.''SE darling - so longing to see you! I have thought of a simple solution to my tangled web. Its this | Yes, you've got your parcel from Cumbria | BUT | I asked you not to open it till Christmas | SO | You dont know what's in it yet | O.K.? | So, nobody's feelings will be upset, & our secret kept secret... | Oh dear I dont think I'd have made a good spy, or politician, but I can still think.'L. MortalityOn 19 September 1989, of his grandchildren: 'My one sadness in extinction is that I will never see these grow up: Sarah or Tom (by the way the new one is to be called Adam.) I might, if my faculties hold, have another five or so years of darling you, & so Charlotte & Erica by proxy. There is only one way to die, for loving people to die, & that is simultaneously - not by accident & not likely. But, come, no Autumn Morbidity! I do hope I'll see you soon'.'I expect it's happened before, but I was delighted to see James billed in the R. Times y'day. He will get to the top - I hope the top he wants. Tonight, again, is Brendel night. How lucky we are! A nice, pretty, & v. intelligent 22-yr. old post-graduate came to interview me for part of a B. Phil Thesis she's writing on the origins of the Third Prog. Oh how old it makes me feel. Then I think of the strangeness of things. When I was 12 we were reading at school Cicero's De Senectute (About old age) & there was a cry in it Edepol Senectus! (By heaven, old age) & we loved it, not realising at all that it was a cry of misery, & rushed out to the playing field shouting it as a war-cry, loving the sound. I once told this to David & somehow he got it into his Latin Prose for the Challenge, & it was one of the things that got him to W'minster!!) I expect I've told you all this, & I am going senile.''My sister-in-law's death - oh it's so odd, that since Bill was killed at Dunkirk 42 years ago, & she - rightly - married again, I havent seen her often. But it let in a flood of memories. It was strange to be talking of Brooke & Owen! The last thing Bill said to me before he went to France, & I was so utterly ill, was Well, you've got the chance to be a poet now. I could never show him, I loved him.''Yesterday began with a crash. Poor S. tripped on the stairs with the (not very) early morning tea. The teapot burst like a bomb, & the milk jug shattered. She scalded her arm, luckily not too badly, as her dressing gown got the worst. | Later in the morning I came out to post bills & so on; & there was a Police Car outside No 42. Oh lord, I thought, Evelyn's been burgled . . . & so she had, by death, on her way to bed, on Sunday night. He stole up silently & suddenly & went off with her heart.''I'm sure you'll be sorry to hear that George Apps is dead. He was 87. He was in the line with Wilfred Owen when he was killed on Nov 14, 1918. George read all my books.'Card dated 22 August 1991, regarding the funeral of common acquaintance: 'I hope you might come, but in a way funerals are all one wants to get away from, without feeling guilty, hypocritical, or mean. If you love someone they can be unbearable, & indeed utterly unreal. One has to go back to the store of nuts, & remember the living being. At my age I read the obituaries & deaths with a kind of feeling 'not me yet' but one's in the last county that has no further boundary. So one enjoys day-by-day, not year-by-year. So, one makes jollier terms 'I hope I'll be . . .' So loving you will last you (I hope) till you die. I am not disturbed, but aggravated by what I am bound to miss, so my darling may I see more of your plans & fruitions!''Yesterday some time in the afternoon Derek Bridgwater's heart stopped. He was a wonderful man, he was 80, he was in the middle of a letter, as clear as ever, his pen was in his hand. He has been so frail & ill lately this was a good merciful way of going. We, & Evelyn Bull, got worried by dark. E. went in & called for S & me. Naturally, there will be things to do, but for Jodie & Eric it was quite, entirely peaceful; she has been angelic - I dont know how far you ever knew him? He was a great & good human.''Keep an after-ever-after-next - for me, if you can, will you? I love you & always I will. You must be bored with my keeping on saying this, but loving you is no SINECURE, but I do & I will, & time runs on, runs out . . .'M. Music and the arts'I'm sure you now the pianist Stephen Bishop - he now adds a ? Czech ? Polish name, but is really American. If you can't hear Brendel, hear him - particularly in Beethoven. I dont know how well you know the symphonic music of Sibelius? They are works of supreme genius to me; but I have other reasons, not musical as well, but look out for a conductor named David Atherton: he's good.''There was a good performance of Sibelius' Symphony No 2. last night. To me it is one of the greatest works; yes, romantic, but NOT falsely so as Tchaikowski often is. It never fails to leave me exhilarated & proud to be human.''Listening to a good performance of Cesar Franck's D. Minor last night made me think a lot of thinks or thoughts.'In 1979: 'Were you at Fonteyn's farewell? - lucky you if you were! It must have been fabulous - 3/4 of an hour of applause - almost the time of two Mozart symphonies!'23 May 1988: 'I am reading Tom Wolfe's A Bonfire of the Vanities. If New Yorkers, of whatever class, have this two word foul mouthedness I'm glad Im too old to even want to go to U.S.A. Its good though, & full of Swiftian satire. I dont recommend you read it - it may be the talk of London; if you do, you'll find your eyes glaze at the adjectives & it's a fascinating story of a people so foreign & yet speaking almost the same language.'N. Politics25 February 1983: 'I suppose, to quote W. S. Gilbert you were born a little Lib-er-al? Being born in the Raj I expect I was a little con-servat-ive. I sometimes wish I had, at Cambridge, been asked to spy, & I think I'd probably have said Well, if they played golf . . . . There is no political element in me, I find.'Writing in 1983 in the unpublished poem 'Hearing Aids' (below) he states that he is quite happy to 'glide along | Oxford St, switched off, | Immune as a happy fish | To the repulsive noises | Of repulsive civisation'.24 August 1990: 'The implications of a Gulf War are so ghastly. One wakes: what is the thick black writing cloud? & one can do nothing, as ever, save contemplate the human races. The generality of the human race was never true. There are, & always have been, more evil than good people. | I cling on to thinking of my loving friends. I could not love an evil person. And foremost of those I love is Sarah Emmeline.''This is St Patrick's Day & one wishes he'd left a snake or so to bite the likes of the Rev. Ian Paisley.''England will be dark & cold & it is, as ever, full of disgruntled people (mostly politicians) quarrelling, scratching, & sniping.)''I waved loyally to the Queen Mum on Thurs but she didn't see & What have you got in that basket? she might have asked: RETSINA for to drink your health, Ma'am.''We leave again on 9th for a peripatetic wk. On the 9th there is the crisis of Election fever. There will be a new younger talking horse for this rotten old borough. No change. Glad my moanings & meanings make you laugh - they're meant to, as well as a kind of mockturtle seriousness.'O. Their relationship18 March 1962: 'I woke very early this morning & thought of you, asleep, so near. When I wake tomorrow I shall be in London. I always think of you before I sleep & when I wake & send my love for the next day & night. I always shall.'7 March 1963: 'This inky talking with your photographs in my pocket is something to me most precious but sometimes I want want want more. Did my poem make any sense to you? I hope it did. Sweetheart one just wants so to go on saying it: I do love you. Oh so much. Perhaps you will never say it again to me, or cannot or may not, only I want you to if you do because oh because I'm greedy or hungry or both.''For Christmas 1964': 'Forgive the hurts & mistakes, they spring from sources sweet, not bitter, always. Today, I think only of the stream which flows through our two lives. It has enriched & made so much of mine'.Postcard, 30 April 1968: 'Oh, I had to spend, what they do, wasting time, O, will I ever see you ever, ever again? [...] I am very lonely, alone, & I think useless. I wish it were four years ago. I can't yet lose, or loose, what we had then'.17 May 1982: 'Life without love is like having an operation without anaesthetic (So, Cyril Connolly) quoted in a review of Graves. R. G. always had a Muse. What's the use of having the best Muse in the business, if I never see her? O roll on 31st!''Beloved Sarah Emmeline | I only pray that when you read this you will be less of the wan pain-filled dear one I had to leave. If I could tell you how I longed to come with you . . . I will tell you, only, than [sic] my love is steadfast. Am I doing as you wish, in not writing, & not trying to see you? Tell me, if you can; it would help me. I miss you so. [...] Sarah E. I have tried so to change, & perhaps I have, but do not imagine the less of love flows toward you. [...] How lovely, after these months, to come to one of the most of all loved places, & be with one of the most of all loved people, & here I am writing this; selfishly knowing you may be in much pain when you get it - forgive that, dearest, if you can, & only just think of the love & affection that is stored for you, to no-one's hurt, no-one's, unless yours which I think, now, you must know couldnt be true?''I lay awake after you'd gone, thinking. How strange: I am alone here, you alone there. I sent signals. I hope you were asleep. | I had been listening to this business of astronauts walking in space, & thinking how silly to make such a fuss. I do, & have done it, for years. | There we are, space between us. Here you come walking out of space & you ask me, say, Can you tell me the way to . . . | I always try & always will try to. You know that. | I had intended to make a poem out of my loving thoughts & feelings, but I cant. Not yet. | Today is fragmented, beyond repair, what with M-n-d & our David & so on. [...] I love you more than words can tell O but my poems do tell & tell & tell, in a way we creative people know.''I didnt notice that Fates was on the back of my little note to you!! I'm rather glad. Sometimes the Fates can be kind, really kind. The Greeks, being the wonderful real people they were, called them the Eumenides the kindly ones as they pursued poor Antigone & Orestes, for the sins of their parents & the great moral truth & courage in themselves.''I was thinking - oh, one always comes back to personal things! how you said to me that you couldnt really recall men you'd slept with & I was wondering & I think I know, anyway, part of why. Let me try & share it. You are so beautiful, as a woman, that men desire you, not for what you really are, but for the superficial gratification of possessing you. I think it wholly admirable not to remember. / But you see - well, it's easier to be personal - a man's love & desire I believe to be a wholly proper instinct. The day S. came softly into my arms - outside the Marble Arch Cinema - I truly believed she would marry me the next day! The next two years were not unrelieved gloom, but awfully agonising. I'm telling you. In the end, we did sleep together [...] I can only imagine the gentleness & love of two women, but imagine it I can, & it is sweet & it is safe & without fear. It must be beautiful. It cannot be wrong.''I'd do for you what I've always done for that other S. It may be rotten luck to be loved by a poet. Sorry if it is. Poems to come.''E Do you understand me, if I say that I sometimes wish David farmed in the north of Scotland? I know it's churlish, I could never say it to anyone else.'Conclusion of letter: 'E ? ? [i.e Emmeline Pallas Athene] / be happy with the love I give you. I'm an always person. / P.'P. A Rift in Time (1982)'My beloved E, darling one! Here is some news, I hope will please you. I wonder if you remember that in December I came to London to see Norah Smallwood, of Chatto's, re. the possible publication of a new collection of poems/ It was - it IS - to be called A Rift in Time. Norah rang this morn. Chatto's will do it!!! Do you know how much this means to me? It's your book - especially, & most of the poems in it are for you &, I daresay, hang around on that ledge above your bed (& are soporific & help you sleep.) But, if England lasts another year, there it will be - your own secretest of presents. [...] I thought my time w. Chatto's was over. NOT SO. & you'll remember how, going along William IV St, I have often said, to my beloved chauffeuse, - There's my publisher in a sad way, & now I can say it in a happy way! I'm there, still. It's a miracle &, as regards my poetry, & the making of it, you are inescapably a part of the miracle, which proves a part can be greater than the whole! [...] Patric Dickinson is wildly happy, that his book for Sarah Hamilton is going (in due time) [in margin 'not till next year'] to be published. It could say, in the prelims, For Sarah, For S. E. H. or not at all. I'd love it to be For Sarah because I love her so. Nobody who matters to you & me, & they arent many, doesnt know that I love my dear goddess! Nobody will mind. So you must NOT. Please? It'll be a glory for me like a rain-moon-bow. Ever seen one? I have. A rift in time.''So let's celebrate our own St Crymble - only one day early - Oh I'm so lucky - there might not have been A Rift in Time, which is my best, had it not been for him, & here I still am; reasonably compos I hope. Had it not been for him, oh yes, the superb surgeon who will never know how he gave me a chance to love, in no order, S. & D & V & S. E. There is an 'order' in the heart; there cannot ever be comparisions or league tables. - Enough.''The reading went well: a full house & people standing at the back. People I knew who came were Ursula V[aughan] W[illiams]; Jonathan Raban; Dallas Bower; Ian McIntyre (Controller [BBC] R[adio]3) (damn good of so-busy-him); John Rice; our nephew Michael; Norah & John Charlton from Chatto's; Billy Gotch of the Royal Literary Fund; oh & Mei & Susie, & Ginny & Arthur, & a nice lot of strangers. I read, really, for two people. I think well, too. I had stuck proof copies in my 'book.' So, in a sense, Ian was there. The P.B.S. people were extremely warm & friendly & put a glass of wine at my elbow as I signed, I suppose about a dozen copies. | Then various of us adjoined to a most delightful pub, the Lamb & Flag, in a crack between Long Acre & Garrick St which was noisy & lively & I talked away. There was a bit of lead in my heart; but it was fun.'On Chatto & Windus publicity card for the book: ' Our little overflow party - yes the Guests & John Collard & the Merricks can all come so you come, too, see. When everyone says this is my best lot it leaves me flat: wanting to do better & what for & who for? Somebody knows. Will she say? [...] Just before we left y'day, I heard (at last, I've been so worried, either that he didn't like it, or was iller) that Malcolm is delighted with my words for The Escape. Isnt that good? It was a splendid party at the Imp. War Mus. The new Director is delightful, & (of course!) an old Wminster. Only 41. But friends there, only 71, 79, etc . . . & some in their mere later 60s including (now Lord) Charteris, whose son was @ Savile, so I got some more smoked s.'There is another rather nice & pleasant bit of news. Read carefully. There is a thing called the Poetry Book Society, run by the Arts Council. (I'm so ancient I was on the poetry panel when it was started.) [...] Well, the P. B. S. chooses, once a quarter, a choice & then a Recommendation. So its only 8 books in a year & though we are not the Christmas choice, we are the Recommend. This is only a bit of honour & glory, but the P.B.S sends a pamphlet round, so A Rift in Time will be known to exist. Isnt that good?''Everyone who has it, thinks A R[ift] i[n] T[ime] my best but no-one has even asked who is Sarah? which is what I wanted. These are poems, your poems & now they're gone (into print). I feel bereft, forlorn.''[...] Will you leave the page-proofs of A Rift in Time where I can find them? I may need them. | Would you like to read the words Ive written for the King's Singers?'Q. His wife Sheila Shannon2 February 1979, having just left hospital, he complains of a 'defective memory too - for I forgot your birthday. Oh darling S. E. what an admission! Please tell me, please. Feb the what-th? You will be 1/2 my age . . . It's an odd thing too that S. & I have been married exactly that, 32 years. She has been marvellous over these last two years of culminating worry & fear. It is much easier to be ill than to watch. We do so want to see you & soon. When you love people you do. In hospital I had a lot of time to think over my past life, since I was, happily, facing more life. I thought a lot of you & how trying I had been & how good both you & S. had been. She is the most precious lifelong love, & one cannot grade these feelings & thoughts. But if I tell you that, as ever, I will love you, it is something I hope you'll be wholly glad for, not worried.' (In a postscript he writes: 'I'll annotate The Bearing B[east] sometime. I cant write poems yet - well soon, I hope. Another pre-operation collection, v. small, may come out later this year.'Regarding her illness: 'Evelyn Ball has been marvellous & various other neighbours. [...] The trouble is I have to work... & of course, unlike when I was ill, she gets no sick benefit.'R. His writing'About a year ago I was asked to contribute to a sale at Sotheby's of Mss., in aid of the Arvon Foundation, so I did. They put a ridiculous reserve on it, as if I were a Dylan, so nobody got a penny. They've just had another sale, in aid of Sotheby's, & put an even more ridiculous reserve. I wrote & said No [underlined three times] reserve, so it - lot 135 - went to someone for ?30, a fair price at that! Darling E after I'm dead, if I get any posthumous recognition - flog all my poems that you have - most of my best - but please, oh please, not my letters to you. They're for you & me. I'd hate anyone else to see, but if you go broke, then do. I shant know. I suppose some weevil of a Thesis-monger might discover you.''My darling dear E, once upon a time an American (female) knocked on the door: she was a Teacher of Speech & Drama & asked me, there & then, to give her a lesson on how to speak poetry, which I think I did, calmly & lucidly. Anyway at the end she pressed a fiver into my hand & I gather observed to S., on the way out, how remarkable it was to find a poet so calm, 'with all that Passion Raging Within. P.R.W. became a byeword in the family. I suspect you've heard this story. Nobody (but poor you maybe) believes I have P.R.W. & also a ghastly capacity for agonising'.17 May 1982: 'Come tomorrow, WORK (for the Times). But dear Vergil has sent me another ?300 from beyond the tomb (in royalties)'. Elsewhere: 'the post brought me a Royalty cheque for ?350 from America for my translation of Vergil. It is a wonderful thing to be supported by one of the greatest poets of our civilisation | It gives one not just bread, but a spiritual yeast.' And again: 'there was a letter from Vergil sending me another ?269 in royalties: so if you see him tell Mark Ive got approx ?350 in the last month for having had a classical education! Artistophanes & Vergil between them have paid my exorbitant water-rate, gas-bill, ditto electric, & telephone.'18 March 1983 'When I write a really dud poem I hear de la Mare's gently chiding voice. Remember, in all the hurlyburly of telephones, contracts, etc remember this: we - creative people - are what we are because of luck, hard work, & others believing in us. Oh darling SE this sounds a ghastly sermony piece. No it's not. [...] Bless Beatrix Potter for wakening me to language at about 3 or 4.'2 January 1984: 'It's the first time in my whole life as a poet that I enter a new year - my 70th - without a single book in print; except my Vergil in U.S.A. & he sent me ?98:99 for Christmas, bless him!'4 November 1987: 'GOOD NEWS, though. Mandeville Press is going to do another little book of poems like To Go Hidden. Something nice to begin 1988 & look forward to. By then, too, another tot.'14 January 1988: 'I begin 1988 with no work, & a pen which wont write the poems & a sluggish mind which blames the pen but I hope things will improve. [...] I have started the year with an unexpected & splendid surprise ?130 royalty on my trans. of Vergil! My one best-seller'.15 March 1988: 'When I was a little boy, one was taught of history, & particularly of Kings, who died of a surfeit e.g. King John died of a sufeit of lampreys - I expect he drank too much & choked. I only say this because I might (but wont) die of a surfeit of poems (not mine) but I find this impracticle sedentary trade is something I cant do for more than hours-at-a-time'1 November 1991: 'The Kent Literature Festival is putting on A Tribute to P. D awfully nice, but one couldnt go & listen to oneself being tributised. I havent blushed for ages: I'd go scarlet to the roots of the hairs I havent got but S. is going, so she can for me!''Ive got reason, (a sudden unexpected cheque fr. N. Zealand.) to celebrate - & with you - & we will, too. S. gets 1/3 & rightly - the play was Lysistrata - I put ?100 in the bank & then, Oh my darling, hen, I shall demand to spend some rights, & rites, on Sarah E. Sarah L is yelling well - she may in time be as beautiful as you are to me, well - she may in time be as beautiful as you are to me, but I'll not, alas, live to see it. I rather fancy myself though as a kind of New Yorker angel, with a crooked halo, & on a very boggy & treacherous cloud. I'll try & draw it.''I can only write bad poetry at the moment, so I discontent myself by writing none. I need my dearest goddess. She isnt a goddess of bread-&-butter reviews, either. However, they help.''Im not popular. But no-one really knew about Thos. Campion or John Donne. We & I say we have in our humanness a Timeless seed. If I say I wish you & I had met, in time, & had children, you may not wish this at all. | Stone weathers slowly, & in the elements of human being it's not restorable. | Please, think it is. I think a lot about alternatives, possibles, & what is lost in the jungles of divorce, & psychiartists' couches. They aren't funny.''My frenzies abate, a bit. That's the sort of line poets think of as poetry now - one could abate them, also, as a bet, a 'But', or even a bite on the Isles of Bute. You see, in my folly, I agreed to judge a Sussex Poetry competition. Last year, it had less than 300 entries. I am faced with 627 adults & 240 children!!! As it turned out, also, I had 5 books' reviews a) For The Times b) London Magazine, c) Country Life. You'd be surprised to know what I, now, know about American militant lesbian-feminism, or the poetry of Pushkin - well I did know a bit about both; & you'd be sad if you thought so many Sussex wives were (to believe their verses) so unhappy & afraid of life (or death.)''Well, the week has brought me some nice cash-y luck, & The Times is to pay me for a review it didn't use - so it should; but after nearly six months I'd clean forgotten! R[adio]3 wants to repeat one of the first lot of Sequences, but the contract has run out. So I get almost ?100 for free. O how lovely it is to be in work!''I wish I - I - I - there's too much of it - but you see, apart from Sheila, there's no-one left in Rye to talk with, so I write poems for you - mostly they are - as you know - or letters to & for you. I hate not writing poems but in sifting I am a sieve & I do like it or wouldnt do it.''I'm quite busy, or unbored by what I have to do - & if I am bored, I say to myself this will pay the rates, or the car-license Or what-have-you, then I think what-have-I? So the floor gets littered w. books & bits.''We are to be invaded next Weds. by Southern TV - some filming of me as me, for an Arts Prog. My life, times, etc. in 6 minutes, though it'll take 3 hours. I dont relish the prospect, but they all seem very nice & efficient. It's going to be done in the garden room. I am to read a poem or so, in the course of it. I'm so used to radio I'm a bit frightened of this. I'll try & think of you, & talk to you.'Card, postmarked 5 January 1983: 'On February 1st I have to go to some dark outpost of last empire, called Eltham, to spend an evening - oh how long! - with Lysistrata, as done @ a Teachers Training Coll. & tell them lots of things abt. Aristophanes & the play, & stay the night.''I've got a 1000-word review done for Alan, (Ross) the London Mag, &, if you happen to see it, our Soldier & Girl Sleeping (Wm. Scott) is nicely reproduced in a rather boring article about Wm. in the present issue. | I think: what painter has painted twilight (1/2 light)? I cant get beyond Whistler & possibly Turner. And of course Palmer did light that never was on sea or land.'I wish I had some journeyman work.''I put semi-colon because that was the way the Gks. did. I'm sure Ive told you? I'm going gaga.''I expect you're full of works? That's good. I am full of nothing, not so good. But I expect it'll change. Cold weeks succeed cold weeks.'S. Her writing'Your two poems: 30/12/81. I like it. It's your usual present-participle mode. Look at the rhythms - couldnt you make the lines better? In free-verse, keep remembering the sound, the look. This needs, as it were, to be framed - it's loose - tighten it! What vali (? vale (which means 'farewell') & the date 30. 1. 74) means, I cant tell. What I like about this IS that the speech is direct & in verbs. I like the image v. much. But why @ the end, in a forest? This is a D. H. Lawrentian kind of poem. Subjective, secret, & yet having a proper emotional meaning. I think I know what that meaning is. There's more to say.'On 3 December 1990: 'By saying a poem wont do I mean wont do for me, as it is. I would like the poet to do a bit more work so as to make the poem. For me the rhymes are too glaring - naif? - & there isn't enough rhythm. i.e This seems to me notes for a poem I like what it says. Often work & practice do, in fact, lead to spontaneity! So dont be cross with me - Ive been at it for over sixty years, & feel old & cold & dispirited.'T. Her personal affairs12 December 1988: 'How's the flat? I hope you'll read this in bed with your tea & put it on that shelf where so much love is & has been.''I keep thinking of your 'once' - your one room; & there it will be. Even a painter's one picture can change walls & houses. And a poem can have many shelves. I think I do understand all - or most - of the problems you face. I expect I'll write a poem for you; so in your room/rooms there must be hiding-places, like those secret drawers in old desks; even if the hiding-places exist only in the imagination.''I'm so sorry about Lady Margaret - who was she to have a road & a college boat club named after her? You must fill-in for me. It all sounds grim & distracting & distressing.''I hope the Mission House is now dry. If not, get the Bishop of Durham to preach in it - that should dry it out & - if there's any - remove Rot dry or wet.''I do hope this wretched business of the studio is soon done with. No, I havent any factual evidence, & I dont hear gossip, it is simply my profound instinct that you must get possession of your own property, as soon as possible. I feel this deeply, & all on your behalf, not just because I love you.''Sarahness, sweetness, gentleness, acute acuteness, how little I can do to be of useness & not uselessness to you. How I wish it were not so! I wish with all my heart & spirit that you could be set free, absolutely free, from these besetting worries.'~15000~AUTOGRAPH LETTERS MANUSCRIPTS POEMS POETRY~ ~0~Box near desk at the moment.~ ~ ~ ~ ~