There was me, that is Mavervorl
I recently finished the two-volume autobiography of Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson And Big God and You've Had Your Time. Burgess, whose Enderby series and the Shakespeare fantasy Nothing Like the Sun are some of my favorite books, wrote an autobiography that made me less interested in him. I did not know that he was also an accomplished composer. He once wrote a song called "Cabbage Face" which used the letters of the title as the notes of the song.
He referenced, on the second-to-last page of his final autobiography, a poet I'd never heard of, Coventry Patmore, and how he, Burgess, might be getting sentimental in his old age because a particular Patmore poem made him cry.
Here is Coventry Patmore's poem, The Toys:
MY little son, who looked from thoughtful eyes
And moved and spoke in quite grown-up wise,
Having my law the seventh time disobeyed,
I struck him and dismissed
With hard words and unkissed,
His Mother, who was patient, being dead.
Then, fearing lest his grief should hinder sleep
I visited his bed,
But found him slumbering deep,
With darkened eyelids, and their lashes yet.
From his late sobbing wet.
And I, with moan,
Kissing away his ters, left others of my own;
For, on a table drawn beside his head,
He had put, within his reach,
A box of counters and a red-veined stone,
A piece of glass abraded by the beach,
And six or seven shells,
A bottle with bluebells,
And two French copper coins, ranged there with careful art,
To comfort his sad heart.
So when that night I prayed
To God, I wept, and said:
Ah, when at last we lie with trancèd breath,
Not vexing Thee in death,
And Thou rememberest of what toys
We made our joys,
How weakly understood
Thy great commanded good,
Then, fatherly not less
Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,
Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say,
"I will be sorry for their childishness."
I went to a bar the other night and they were playing A Clockwork Orange on the wall. That's a fun movie.
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by Marty Barrett at Sunday, October 09, 2005
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