Poetry for Pleasure
When: 4th Tuesday afternoon from March 22nd.
Where: home - South Croydon
POETRY for PLEASURE is a small friendly group for those who want to develop an appreciation of poetry. We aim to widen our knowledge of poetry and introduce its charm and humour to the sceptical or the just curious member.
From a pre-selected Poet or Theme, we read aloud our choices and then have an informal discussion on what it might mean.... or even settle on just admiring the words. Our range is wide in style and period: from Angelou to Armitage or Dryden to Duffy.
The Poetry for Pleasure Group had an unusual meeting with Jill Saudek, a retired English and Drama teacher (most recently at Croydon High School) had got in touch with Croydon u3a. She had published a book of poems, and was keen to make it known to local groups.
Together with her husband, she came to the home of Gwyneth Kimble, where our meetings are held. The idea for her book, Poems from Paintings came during the Covid lockdown. She selects a painting, studies it closely, thinks about it during a walk, and returns home to set down her interpretation in verse.
On laptops and tablets members of the Group were able to see the paintings which inspired the poems Jill had selected. She read them in an expressive voice. She had noticed features of the paintings which a cursory look would have missed.
One poem was about the well-known picture, Rain, Steam and Speed by Turner (1844). A locomotive approaches [on the Maidenhead rail bridge], the surroundings partly obscured by a rain storm. Below on the river is a small boat, and beyond are the arches of a road bridge:
It hurtles onward with impossible speed:
From where we stand there can be no escape;
It leaves the insubstantial, dim landscape
Of ages past, exulting in its powers…
In Jill’s interpretation, the train represents progress, leaving behind the past and the old ways.
The passengers, bewildered by the wind…
Can’t make out the swiftly vanishing past –
The land is lost in rain, a tear-dimmed blur –
But understand that old ways cannot last…
Jill’s stimulating presentation was a prompting to study paintings with more care than we often bestow. Her book is available via the internet: from Blackwell’s for £9-26 with free delivery. (The book doesn’t include reproductions, but the paintings are readily accessible on the internet.)
Members had themselves selected poems related to pictures.
Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn begins with words we remember (don’t we?):
Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of Silence and slow Time…
He then describes the pictures painted on the ‘Attic shape’: the mortals or gods, the piper, the pursuing lover, the boughs which will never shed their leaves, the priest leading a heifer to sacrifice. He ends with his proclamation of faith:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Another member had chosen the amusing ‘take’ on Uccello’s St George and the Dragon (1470) by the modern poet, U A Fanthorpe. The dragon complains that the artist has not chosen his best side. The captive maiden, who has the dragon on a string, is in two minds:
It’s hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon…
The knight is well equipped:
I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence…
Tea on the patio, to the tinkle of a fountain, ended a stimulating afternoon.
Please contact the group leader for more information.
