Poems at Bedtime

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

TL;DR: I bought ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’ for G.

My parents would read me poetry at bedtime. More accurately, my father would recite, my mother would read. My father’s recitations generally opened with the Polish Romantic epic ‘Pan Tadeusz’ by Mickiewicz that begins:

Lithuania! My Homeland! You are like good health:
Only he learns how precious you are
Who has lost you. Today I am able to see — and describe in writing —
Your full beauty, precisely because I miss you.

The distinctive rhythm, that of my childhood, is more obvious in the Polish in which, naturally, it was recited:

Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jesteś jak zdrowie:
Ile cię trzeba cenić, ten tylko się dowie,
Kto cię stracił. Dziś piękność twą w całej ozdobie
Widzę i opisuję, bo tęsknię po tobie.

The English Romantic poets followed; Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ flowed and surged:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

And then the breathless charge of Byron’s ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’, my father’s favourite:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

And though I scarcely understood the poems and their resonances, Pan Tadeusz not at all, I could hear the echoes of the military marches that my father loved. And perhaps, distantly, of the moments, as he waded ashore at Pahlavi in Iran in 1942, and that he knew he might live, and they sang a patriotic hymn: ‘Lord who Saved Poland in Ages Past’:

O Thou Lord God, who for so many ages
Didst give to Poland splendour and might
Who shielded her from storms’ wild rages
And kept her ever in Thy holy sight.
Father, we kneel to plead before Thy throne,
Give to us freedom, give to us our own!

Boże, coś Polskę przez tak liczne wieki
Otaczał blaskiem potęgi i chwały,
Coś ją osłaniał tarczą swej opieki
Od nieszczęść, które przywalić ją miały.
Przed Twe ołtarze zanosim błaganie,
Ojczyznę wolną racz nam wrócić, Panie!

Perhaps this was one of the songs he sang in the car as we headed on holiday, and my grandmother turned to look out of the window.

My mother read. Principally, ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’. Because of G, I have retuned to it, though, of course, it has somehow always been with me. It opens with the moving dedication to Stevenson’s nanny, Alison Cunningham:

For the long nights you lay awake
And watched for my unworthy sake:
For your most comfortable hand
That led me through the uneven land:
For all the story-books you read:
For all the pains you comforted:

For all you pitied, all you bore,
In sad and happy days of yore:—
My second Mother, my first Wife,
The angel of my infant life—
From the sick child, now well and old,
Take, nurse, the little book you hold!

And it closes with ‘To Any Reader’:

As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
So you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.

As I look now, though the poetry speaks to the child, it is the adult that leads one into, and out of, the garden.

I read to my own children, I recall Belloc’s ‘The Yak’:

As a friend to the children commend me the Yak.
You will find it exactly the thing:
It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,
Or lead it about with a string.

The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet
(A desolate region of snow)
Has for centuries made it a nursery pet,
And surely the Tartar should know!

Then tell your papa where the Yak can be got,
And if he is awfully rich
He will buy you the creature—or else he will not.
(I cannot be positive which.)

It had a contemporary coda, I cannot determine the source:

We’re very depressed with our yak,
Which has now become terribly slack.
It cleaned the kitchens and stairs
Better than many au pairs,
But now we have to take our yak back.

But for G, it is to the garden I return, drawing as near as I can to the ‘child, far, far away’ that is me. I am grown up, but not gone away.