The evenings are one dazzle

It's been a glorious day here in Edinburgh ... I know we're on the East-coast; but I'm reminded of my very favourite Norman Nicholson poem - as I sit in our small tenement back-garden (pictured), with the late evening sun breaking through the trees:


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)

---

I lived and worked in Carlisle, throughout 1985 ... 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 this poem, and much more in that last verse which is a beautiful, elegiac piece of poetry.

Truly wonderful.