[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.I learned by heart the passage,The Imagination then I consider either as primary or secondary.The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.The Secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation.It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify.It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead … Fancy, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites.The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the will, which we express by the word Choice.But equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.Good sense is the body of poetic genius, Fancy its drapery, Motion its life, and Imagination the soul that is everywhere and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole.I was fascinated by the implied gap, the darkness, the Waste Land between Fancy and Imagination, and the lonely journey when the point of Fancy had been passed and only Imagination lay ahead.It became my goal, a kind of religion.No one had ever forbidden association with or frowned on Imagination, and although I had few illusions about my own share, I held it in my secret poetic life, it flowed between the poetry and prose I read and myself, and even the probable mockery of others, or my own more likely self-mockery with ‘frustration’, ‘sublimation’, could not hurt or destroy it for it was, as Coleridge and all the poets had said, ‘supreme’, and at that time of my life when I was learning that life is a presentation of many feasts from which one is often fearful of being turned away, I found the feast of imagination spread almost in loving fashion, in great kindness and abundance.The war continued.I worried about my decayed teeth, my clothes, money, teaching.On pay day, cashing my cheque for nine pounds three and ninepence at Arthur Barnetts, I went with other students to the Silver Grille for a ‘mixed grill please’.Some of the students even drank coffee.They – we – the quieter ones – talked of the wild exploits of certain other students, enviously noting who ‘went with’ a medical student, for medical students were said to ‘know everything’ about sex.‘Let me show you your spare rib,’ they’d say.And the war continued, giving an air of unreality layered upon the ordinary air of unreality, forming an atmosphere of sadness, pity, helplessness.The everlasting question was Why.At Number Four Garden Terrace, Uncle George’s pallor changed to the grey of approaching death.He no longer went out walking or came downstairs to visit Aunty Isy in the sitting room, and talk to her and to Billy the Budgerigar, who could say, ‘Pretty Boy, Pretty Boy, Billy.Up the stairs to bed, up the stairs to bed.’ More and more tubes of lanoline were emptied and disposed of.Before I went to my room I’d say hello to Uncle George, standing at the foot of the bed, scanning his concealed shape for signs of the cancer which he and Aunty Isy guarded so closely and fed so lavishly on Sharlands Lanoline.Then one Sunday when I returned from walking in the cemetery, Aunty Isy met me at the door.‘Uncle George has passed away, Jean.’I had not known him.Uncle George the commercial traveller, who had once lived at Middlemarch.Middlemarch.Middlemarch.The way Aunty Isy used to say it, I thought she owned Middlemarch and the world, but it was Uncle George she owned.And although I did not even love him, confronted by his dying, I felt a wild grief and, bursting into tears, I ran upstairs to my room.I did not go to College the next day, and when Mr Partridge asked me to explain my absence I said, consciously adopting a sad voice fitting for grief, ‘My uncle died in the weekend and I stayed home to help my aunt.’Uncle George’s sisters had taken him next door to Number Five for the funeral, and I had the feeling that a long-lasting dispute about the possession of Uncle George had been settled by his removal next door.The big bed in the room next to mine was covered with a new spring-bright bedspread, while the dustbin where I sneaked to dispose of wrappers and sanitary towels was packed with the familiar blue and white empty tubes.Aunty Isy was still silent about the illness and the death.She took little time off work, a day or two to tidy the house and wash or burn a bundle of bed linen.Sometimes her face and eyes had a dusky look, like that of grief when there are no tears being shed.But she still talked of Middlemarch, reinvesting it with the feeling that now had nowhere else to go.4Again ‘A Country Full of Rivers’I kept the continuing war within the boundaries of modern literature, and when a new student would arrive, slightly older, limping, with one leg or one arm, I viewed him from the safety of myth as ‘the old soldier home from the wars’.I emerged blinking from the half-dark of Dostoyevsky, the star- and sky-filled grandeur of Thomas Hardy’s world with the isolating, oppressing, indifferent hand of doom upon each character, that is, from the writers who were dead, to discover there were writers who were only recently dead or who were living and writing in the midst of the war.I read James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, the poetry of Auden, Barker, MacNeice, Laura Riding (noting that she had been the wife of Robert Graves) and – Dylan Thomas, the hero, then, I’m sure, of every student who read or wrote poetry.I bought the Poems of Sydney Keyes, and took much time to gaze at his photograph and mourn his early death.I treasured a small volume of T.S.Eliot, a large anthology, Poetry London, with drawings by Henry Moore and writing by Henry Miller, and my Poetry in Wartime, where, isolated from our own casualty lists and the deaths of young men we’d known in Oamaru, brothers or sons of neighbours, I lived within the air raids on London, the routine of the fire-watchers and the air-raid wardens – many of the poems had been written ‘while fire-watching’.I knew by heart Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’, poems on the ‘Four Seasons of War’, Lynette Roberts’ ‘Lamentation’:Five hills rocked and four homes fellthe day I remember the raid so well.Eyes shone like cups chipped and stiff,the living bled, the dead lay in their grief.Dead as ice-bone breaking the hedge,dead as soil failing of good heart.Dead as trees quivering with shockat the hot death from the plane.There was a national activity known as the War Effort which touched my life, as all were expected to take part [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]