Host

I heard it was for sale and thought I’d go
To see the old house where
He lived three years, and died. How could I know
Its stones, its trees, its air,
The stream, the small church, the dark rain would say:
“You’ve come; you’ve seen; now stay.”

“A guest?” I asked. “Yes, as you are on earth.”
“The means?” “. . . will come, don’t fear.”
“What of the risk?” “Our lives are that from birth.”
“His ghost?” “His soul is here.”
“He’ll change my style.” “Well, but you could do worse
Than rent his rooms of verse.”

Joy came, and grief; love came, and loss; three years –
Tiles down; moles up; drought; flood.
Though far in time and faith, I share his tears,
His hearth, his ground, his mud;
Yet my host stands just out of mind and sight,
That I may sit and write.

Flash

Bright bird, whose swift blue wings gleam out
As on the stream you dip and rise,
You, as you scan for parr and trout,
Flash past my eyes.

Bright trout, who glints in fin and scale,
Whose whim is grubs, whose dream is flies,
You, with one whisk of your quick tail,
Flick past my eyes.

Bright stream, home to bright fish and birds,
A gold glow as the gold sun dies,
You too, too fast for these poor words,
Flow past my eyes.

But such drab words, ah, sad to say,
When all that’s bright has fled and gone,
Praised by dull folk, dressed all in grey,
Live on and on.

This

Hearts-ease, hearts-bane; a balm that chafes one raw;
The soul in splints; graph with no grid or gauge;
A fort, a house on stilts, a hut of straw;
A tic, a weal, the flu, the plague, the rage;
Bug swept in through the net; moth with a sting;
Two planes in fog jammed blind; a mailed kid glove;
A dance on coals that makes us yelp and sing;
A rook or roc or swan or goose or dove;
A beast of light; a blaze to quench or stoke;
Bread burst and burnt; sweet wind-fall; storm-cloud-milk;
Hope raised and razed; skin-ploy; sleep-foil; steel-silk;
Hands held in lieu of breath; our genes’ sick joke;
The sea to drink or sink in; the gods’ sty;
What we must have or die; or have and die.

* * *


When I was seventeen or so, I came to England (from India) to do my A-levels in physics and mathematics. In the event, I did only one A-level: in English. One of our set books was a collection of George Herbert’s verse. I felt a deep affinity for Herbert from the first time I read him – though I am not Christian and am, indeed, hardly religious.

When, more than three decades later, I heard that his house near Salisbury was on sale, I felt I had to visit it. I had no intention of buying it; I simply wanted to see the place where such poems as “Love” (“Love bade me welcome”) and “Virtue” (“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright”) had been written. I felt troubled, in fact, that in 1980 the Church had sold his rectory off. If they had to sell something to keep their finances in order, why not sell off a cathedral or two instead of the house of the greatest Anglican poet?

I saw the house, felt its atmosphere, and – though I could not really afford to – made a bid for it. It struck me that had the house belonged to Donne or Milton or some more overtly forceful personality, I would not have been able to live there. But Herbert, for all his depth and richness, is a clear writer and a tactful spirit. He might influence me but would not wish to wrest me from myself.

Herbert came from an aristocratic Welsh family; he was Public Orator at Cambridge and had a promising career as a diplomat or courtier ahead of him. Instead, he chose to be a parish priest. The humble parish of Bemerton near Salisbury was offered to him by Charles I “if it be worth his acceptance”. He found the house in a ramshackle condition, and when, in 1630, he became rector, repaired and expanded it at his own expense. It was to be his only parish; he died of consumption three years later at the age of thirty-nine. He wrote a few lines “To My Successor”, which are carved in stone in the north wall of the rectory:

If thou chance for to find
A new house to thy mind
And built without thy cost
Be good to the poor
As God gives thee store
And then my labour’s not lost.

I bought the house in 2003. The garden runs down to the river Nadder, and the wood and water meadows beyond form part of the land. At the beginning I felt Herbert’s presence hourly, both within the house and outside. As time passed, I began to think of it as being somewhat more my own, but still, indefinably, shared.

Early in 2007, while I was in Delhi but thinking of Salisbury, I wrote six poems, of which three are printed here. They were set as a song-cycle under the title “Shared Ground” by the composer Alec Roth and performed at the Salisbury, Chelsea and Lichfield Festivals. Though the mood and spirit of these poems are my own, they are formally modelled on poems by Herbert: in the cases of “Host”, “Flash” and “This” on “Love (III)”, “Virtue” and “Prayer (I)” – some of the loveliest of his poems, and among my favourites. One of the oddities of “Prayer (I)” is that it has no main verb, and I have kept to this feature. In addition, and I am not quite sure why (except that it seems consonant with Herbert’s spirit of simplicity) the poems that I have written are all monosyllabic.

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