The dazzle

Prompted by a recent blip from SpotsOfTime, I was delighted to discover that (the poet) Norman Nicholson's family home actually looks set to be saved, and that there are plans to turn the ground floor of the three-storey building into a café and community hub, with the two upper floors becoming home to a museum which will interpret Nicholson’s work :-)

Am sure I've mentioned before, but my mild-obsession with poetry goes all the way back to my High School days, and not that long after (throughout 1985) I actually lived and worked in Carlisle ... I so wish I'd known about Nicholson's work at the time: I would definitely have visited Millom in the hope of meeting him!

Anyhow - I'll just have to visit that new museum, in due course ...

... meantime; here's my very favourite Norman Nicholson poem, the last few lines of which, feature on his gravestone:


Sea to the West

When the sea’s to the west
The evenings are one dazzle -
You can find no sign of water.
Sun upflows the horizon;
Waves of shine
Heave, crest, fracture,
Explode on the shore;
The wide day burns.
In the incandescent mantle of the air.

Once, fifteen,
I would lean on handlebars,
Staring into the flare,
Blinded by looking,
Letting the gutterings and sykes of light
Flood into my skull.

Then, on the stroke of bedtime,
I’d turn to the town,
Cycle past purpling dykes
To a brown drizzle
Where black-scum shadows
Stagnated between backyard walls.
I pulled the warm dark over my head
Like an eiderdown.

Yet in that final stare when I
(Five times, perhaps, fifteen)
Creak protesting away -
The sea to the west,
The land darkening -
Let my eyes at the last be blinded
Not by the dark
But by the dazzle.

---

Norman Nicholson (1914-1987)

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