Late on All Hallows Eve, an email from a friend arrives with three ‘bagatelles’. This morning I look up the word, forgotten since his last similar gift. Definitions include the game, and then ‘a short literary or musical piece, in a light style’. One source adds, ‘too unimportant or easy to be worth much consideration’. I don’t like the self-deprecating tone here, I think I will tell my friend: there are enough keen critics out there without adding your voice to theirs. But it’s an intriguing word, deriving apparently from the 16th century French word for a trinket or knick-knack, via the Italian bagatelle, a trifle, from the diminutive of the Latin baca, berry. I’m thinking again of the game – a childhood memory has a wooden board with a fearsome spring – where ‘small balls are hit and then allowed to roll down…’ according to Oxford Dictionaries online. So a perfect metaphor, I think, for a speculative piece which launches an idea and then allows it to go where it will.
This morning, then, a new month which reverberates with old echoes. Ted Hughes’s November is all rain, ‘sodden as the bed of an ancient lake’ and indeed the golden rain of falling leaves has become a persistent drizzle as I pedal home along the river. Simon Armitage’s ‘November’ epitomises bleak: the poet and his friend are delivering John’s grandma to the ward to die with ‘her towel, soap and family trinkets’. They feel ‘the terror of the dusk begin’ as they recognise, in the ‘pasty bloodless smiles’ and the ‘stunned brains’ of those around them, the fate that is waiting for them not far down the line. The poem puts me in mind of my mum’s last months. When the Parkinson’s bites, as it does increasingly between doses these days, I recognise in myself so many of her late mannerisms, the wincing and the whining and the losses of grace – or do I mean gracefulness? Hers, though, like my dad’s 14 years earlier, was a spring death and, as deaths go, a good one, I think. She certainly felt loved, both by family and by her carers in St Georges. In the minutes after she stopped breathing, a kind of Greek chorus of all the staff materialised in the room and just stood in a sort of respectful silence. Later, one of the care assistants, an ebulliently eccentric woman from Portugal who helped dress her for the last time said, ‘Clarice was my first death.’
Unlike Philip Larkin, whose poem ‘The Old Fools’ presents an unremittingly grim account of ageing, Armitage’s version does allow some light: ‘Sometimes the sun spangles’ he says, ‘and we feel alive’. ‘Spangles’ – another lovely relic of a word. It reminds me of a photo I took of Mum perhaps two or three weeks before she died. I’d bundled her up in as many layers as we could manage. She was pretty grumpy about the outing and I had to take her out in her slippers. Once we made it to the Botanics, though, she was happy enough to be pushed around. In the photograph she is practically inside the large flowering cherry on the lawn in front of the glasshouses, which is covered in blossom sparkling in the sunshine under a Mediterranean sky. Her woollen hat is pulled down over her forehead, and she is smiling that vague smile…
Unlike Philip Larkin, whose poem ‘The Old Fools’ presents an unremittingly grim account of ageing, Armitage’s version does allow some light: ‘Sometimes the sun spangles’ he says, ‘and we feel alive’. ‘Spangles’ – another lovely relic of a word. It reminds me of a photo I took of Mum perhaps two or three weeks before she died. I’d bundled her up in as many layers as we could manage. She was pretty grumpy about the outing and I had to take her out in her slippers. Once we made it to the Botanics, though, she was happy enough to be pushed around. In the photograph she is practically inside the large flowering cherry on the lawn in front of the glasshouses, which is covered in blossom sparkling in the sunshine under a Mediterranean sky. Her woollen hat is pulled down over her forehead, and she is smiling that vague smile…
I have a very soft spot for Simon Armitage, not least for the nostalgic reminder of some of my favourite if often most tricky students who laboured through the selection of his poems in the dreaded GCSE Anthology. ‘Oh another teacher,’ he said when Debbie & I formed part of the audience in the pub in Greenhead, one of the stops on his ‘Walking Home’ tour and I mentioned how much I loved ‘Homecoming’. Like ‘November’, this poem considers our take on time, when a ringing phone remains unanswered since ‘it's sixteen years or so until we’ll meet’. Unlike ‘November’, time in ‘Homecoming’ endures and reassures: if you trust enough to ‘step backwards’ into it you will find that, even after all these years, the canary-yellow jacket ‘still fits’. And then there’s that wonderfully wry recording of ‘You’re beautiful’ on the Poetry Archive, the gravelly voice crunching through those delicious northern vowels. This is one performance always guaranteed to make me chuckle.
Not much levity here, though: I find myself fairly dreading the winter with all the gloom of a seasoned Cumbrian. All those long months of long nights and short days, getting up in the dark and going to bed in the dark, reaching its nadir in the winter solstice just before Christmas, ‘the year’s midnight’ John Donne called it. For Mike McCarthy, though, the 21st December is a cause for celebration and a source of joy. Unlike human time, which is linear – there is no escaping the fact that, like John’s grandma in Armitage’s poem, the monstering of age, disease and death awaits us – the earth moves in a cycle, and this lowest point is the moment when the days begin to lengthen, the moment when the miracle of rebirth begins. One of the bagatelles which has shot – or rolled? – into my inbox plays with the notion of counting time by making as many hour glasses as it takes to contain all the sands of the desert. Each glass will have its hour. I’m stopped in my tracks by the subtleties of this sentence.
We trade words, my friend and I, like kids swapping – well, what did we swap when we were children? Beads? Cigarette cards (were there really such things?)? Anyway, this is our currency. And here is a book (Alison Brackenbury’s Skies, with its beautiful cover) that I will give in October. By chance it contains a poem for October, a two-liner as I remember. And another entitled January 7th, which I read on the train. I see that it tells a story not unlike ours, save for the last bleak verse: the yellow jacket in this poem ‘flies like a flag’ alone on the line; the future is only a ‘long night’ of rain. I wonder if my friend will spot the likeness. Turns out he discovered the poem months ago! I don’t go much on praying these days but I am reminded that others might. And I’m thanking whatever it is in the universe that ordains that, come January, snowdrops will be in flower and all that new life will be well on the way. As for the bagatelle: whilst the beads or balls or tiny berries are subject to the whim of fortune or the pull of the earth, we are not powerless. A soft or a sudden start, even a slight tilting of the board, can change things entirely.
'November' by Ted Hughes was first published in Lupercal (Faber & Faber 1960)
Works by Simon Armitage: 'November' first published in Zoom (Bloodaxe Books 1995)
'Homecoming' first published in CloudCuckooLand (Faber & Faber 1997)
Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way (Faber & Faber 2012)
'The Old Fools' by Philip Larkin first appeared in High Windows (Faber & Faber 1974)
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy was published by John Murray in 2015
Skies by Alison Brackenbury was published by Carcanet Press in March 2016
Works by Simon Armitage: 'November' first published in Zoom (Bloodaxe Books 1995)
'Homecoming' first published in CloudCuckooLand (Faber & Faber 1997)
Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way (Faber & Faber 2012)
'The Old Fools' by Philip Larkin first appeared in High Windows (Faber & Faber 1974)
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy was published by John Murray in 2015
Skies by Alison Brackenbury was published by Carcanet Press in March 2016
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