Let my eyes at the last be blinded by the dazzle

Running rest-day - thank goodness ;-)

And, the first poem since last Monday!

By complete chance, last Saturday night, I caught a programme on Radio 4 about the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson ... to my shame, I'd never heard of him before, but was so enthralled by the programme - and the poetry that was read out - that I quickly purchased the pictured 2008 Collected Poems.

It really is a wonderful volume - I can't recommend it highly enough.

Being some 450-pages long, I've not read every poem yet - but here's my favourite so far:


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)

---

Throughout 1985, I lived and worked in Carlisle in Cumbria ... and the sunset over the Solway Firth, particularly at the end of a long Summer's day, was indeed something to behold.

I think Nicholson captures that in the poem above, and much more in that last verse which is a beautiful, elegiac piece of poetry.

To think he was living just down the coast in Millom, that year I resided in Carlisle ... I only wish I'd known.