a lifetime burning in every moment

There are moments when one's perception of the world cuts with the keenest of knife edges, so that everything one sees, hears, tastes, smells, and touches becomes the doorway to an epiphanic knowing that slices through the dull dross of everyday experience, touching it with a glinting brilliance, hard as truth.

Hopkins called these moments 'inscapes', and wrote about them with a beauty that has been unsurpassed by any other writer in the English language ever since.

Sometimes, though, these moments coalesce and last, for days, weeks, months - and during these times, it does seem as if a lifetime is indeed burning in every moment, as Eliot famously put it in his 'Four Quartets'. And what else is there for us to do but to sing of these moments, in whatever way we know best?

Oh may my heart's truth still be sung on this high hill in a year's turning.



Poem In October

............It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
...........And the mussel pooled and the heron
..........................Priested shore
...................The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
...................Myself to set foot
.........................That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

............My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
............Above the farms and the white horses
........................And I rose
...................In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
...................Over the border
........................And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

............A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
............Blackbirds and the sun of October
........................Summery
...................On the hill's shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
...................To the rain wringing
........................Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

............Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
............With its horns through mist and the castle
........................Brown as owls
...................But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
...................There could I marvel
........................My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

............It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
............Streamed again a wonder of summer
........................With apples
...................Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
...................Through the parables
........................Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels

............And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
............These were the woods the river and sea
........................Where a boy
...................In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
...................And the mystery
........................Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

............And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
............Joy of the long dead child sang burning
........................In the sun.
...................It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
...................O may my heart's truth
........................Still be sung
On this high hill in a year's turning.


(Dylan Thomas)
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