W.H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ describes Yeats’s death in January 1939, culminating in: ‘The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.’ I often think the word should be ‘readers’ rather than ‘admirers’, for as Auden himself says in the next stanza: ‘The words of a dead man/Are modified in the guts of the living.’
I walked to Cambridge station (it’s chaos up there for wheeled transport at the moment) to meet someone off a train, and discovered as I approached Station Road that I had ten minutes in hand. I stopped walking, then, and crossed the road to pay my respects at the War Memorial.
I swear I have never seen so many wreaths and crosses around it as this year. There must have been over thirty wreaths on its plinth, mainly from organisations of all kinds and ethnicities, as well as humble wooden crosses with a poppy in the middle and the name of a relative written on them.
The solemnity, and sometimes passion, of the inscriptions — these historically grieving voices — were more moving than I had expected. Two of the wreaths bore lines by Brooke and Binyon: the first sentence of ‘The Soldier’, and the mantric line from ‘For the Fallen’. The latter was written as: ‘They shall not grow old’…
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Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon c.1901
George Calderon, 1912
Captain of the 11
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
‘He became his admirers…’
W.H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ describes Yeats’s death in January 1939, culminating in: ‘The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.’ I often think the word should be ‘readers’ rather than ‘admirers’, for as Auden himself says in the next stanza: ‘The words of a dead man/Are modified in the guts of the living.’
I walked to Cambridge station (it’s chaos up there for wheeled transport at the moment) to meet someone off a train, and discovered as I approached Station Road that I had ten minutes in hand. I stopped walking, then, and crossed the road to pay my respects at the War Memorial.
I swear I have never seen so many wreaths and crosses around it as this year. There must have been over thirty wreaths on its plinth, mainly from organisations of all kinds and ethnicities, as well as humble wooden crosses with a poppy in the middle and the name of a relative written on them.
The solemnity, and sometimes passion, of the inscriptions — these historically grieving voices — were more moving than I had expected. Two of the wreaths bore lines by Brooke and Binyon: the first sentence of ‘The Soldier’, and the mantric line from ‘For the Fallen’. The latter was written as: ‘They shall not grow old’…
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