vibrating with groans, down onto the steppes.
And life that is ripe, lapses by fragments,
while bottom-feeder elegy accepts
the floor, as a warhead does the pavement.

Thuds on the land, and quakes in the air.
A stammer in the brass mounts as a swarm
of drones, smearing distance with closing fear.
Music gestures towards its norms,

since the Last Trump even is overcome,
takes its time to be over with, and done.

Woodford Halse - 4 September 2026

The 5th Symphony ( 1980-82) of Valentin Vasylyovych Silvestrov ( b. 1937).

defeat disguised as a victory.
Kwame Nkrumah, Arthur Lewis
and Azikiwe were the lictors
of freedom, while the Windrush serviced

a route for migrants, who did not want
to become New World Americans.
That ship, the reverse Arethusan font
of some river that crossed meridians

to an old country that seemed a beacon.
And I went back for just the same reason.

Woodford Halse - 4 September 2026

The HMT Empire Windrush was the vessel that brought the first wave of Caribbean migrants to Britain in June 1948. Tilbury Docks was the landing place. Windrush is also the name of a Cotswolds/Oxfordshire river.

I refer to the aitiological myth of the river Arethusa that was supposed to rise in the Peloponnese and flow west into the Mediterranean, to resurge at Syracuse in Sicily from a spring. Quite a few British poets have made an underground river of the River Mole; Spenser, Drayton, Milton and Alexander Pope in his Windsor Forest.

And what we all hoped for, from the UK, an alternative Anglosphere pole to the United States, has been a disappointment. Making do and taking responsibility for profound errors, are the definitive British predicaments for everybody here. Being wrong is not limited to one class or social group.

New Zealand by contrast gets a lot right, yet now has a low doll’s house ceiling intellectually and culturally, among the non-Maori population. There was a jail-break from that in the mid-twentienth century, and a peak by the 1990s, yet by 2010, the horizons of expectation were closing again.

Caribbeans wanted to avoid segregation in the United States, and who can blame them. But the UK must use its current geopolitical challenges to redefine itself, without reverting to nativism and nimbyism. There can be no flight down the hobbit hole.

cut and coppiced by love for poetics.
Because poetry has been sinless
in these British Isles, since the ascetics
met with bards at Drumceat; unless

the British Sicilian counts, who fought
for lightborn Pelagius from Sicily,
with migraine-dark Augustine, one Autumn
world like this one. Yes, in complicity

with unspoiled berries of verse like Dafydd’s,
who felt his love’s millrace pulse, beat rapid.

Woodford Halse - 3 September 2026

Truly, what sense of that sin or evil in Literature has there been in the British Isles, compared to sub-Roman, Byzantine or Carolingian Europe ? Since the Convention of Druim Ceat or Drumceat in Ireland in Co Derry on Mullagh Hill at Limavady in 575 CE, a license was allowed traditional poetics and an accommodation with pre-Christian Latin poetics and the requirements of the Church. Poetry has retained an innocence and naturalness, perhaps.

Scarcely, has there been a Pet Shop Boys guilt at poetics, such as their song It’s a Sin expresses, as there has been on the Continent. Even a post-Lutheran or para-Lutheran like Goethe carried the crepuscule of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale with him in to old age. In Russia, Dostoyevsky’s sense of redemption out of even transgression, implicates the act of writing. This is why Prince Myshkin writes the sample of calligraphy he does for the General in The Idiot.

Dafydd ap Gwilym ( 1315/2- 50 or maybe 1370) is a great Welsh language poet, easily the peer of Petrarch or Chaucer, or Spain’s Archpriest of Hita in that century. There is a debate as to when he died and where he is buried, and this is such a partisan dispute, I dare not go into it, except that I prefer the version that he died of the Plague at the Cistercian Monastery of Strata Florida in Wales. Trilingual in Welsh, Norman French and Latin, he belonged to Welsh gentry and castellans, but lived the life of a traditional poet of praise and lament for patrons, and of earthly and not-quite-this-world loves as well.

That is why I call him a Pelagian, after that late Roman British Christian heresy that denied Original Sin, named after the British theologian Pelagius ( c 354 -418). Poetry in the British Isles at least, has been sinless or guiltless for their inhabitants, except when the Theatre was condemned.

I find Dafydd a marvellous poet. I know of no other with such a rich and original colour sense, or such an outpouring of love.

There is a movement in the UK right now to replace Imperial symbolism in public space. This is justified. No more influential book has been written in the past three decades than Linda Colley’s Britons - Forging the Nation 1707 - 1837 of 1992. No one group however should be the exceptionalist secular Levites of this decolonising nationalism, whether they be the colonised victims of Imperialism - Celts and Scots, Black people and South Asians and indigenous peoples about the globe, or Malays, Chinese and Arabs and Jews. So many have experienced severity. We cannot talk of Ted Hughes’ Lands of the Lion anymore as in his Queen Mother poems.

The native English population has been enserfed, press-ganged, indentured; and subjected to clearances like the Highlanders and Irish. The Irish were deprived of their lands and pitch-capped. It does not help when some groups are forward in this, while native English are reduced to lolling-tongued Cross of St George mutes, as that flag hangs out of their mouths.

It is not a bad start perhaps to go back to the original virtue of poetry in these isles, and welcome the new poetics so as to widen the fold. Maybe we are back to “Arthur” and a multiracial decolonising sub-Roman Britain, that was as much a period of resurgence and survival as of apparent civilisational collapse.

For Rome burned of her own accord,
just as London, after the Medway burned;
and wit is all you can afford,
when poiesia may not be earned.

This is why the prone city is waste land,
why a blind man is led to the printers,
through a city purified to be grand;
a Domus Aurea out of cinders.

And there is only laughter and hiss.
Writing is such a wicked business.

Woodford Halse - 3 September 2026

taking poison like Mithridates
and not dying meanwhile of the same.
Blazing indignation would be rabies,
rejecting water for acid and flame.

For Bataille said, poets are meant to burn.
John Dryden, for writing like Juvenal,
John, John Junior and Charles in turn
translating outgroups and liminals

into that same abuse. Bataille and Sade -
immune from self-infesting pasquinade.

Woodford Halse - 2 September 2026

There are limits to Satire, but it is always self-harming as Georges Bataille said of all poetry.

Georges Bataille ( 1915 -62 ), a most controversial French philosopher, and student of Evil, while Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade ( 1740 - 1814 ) needs no introduction.

John Dryden translated the 1st, 3rd, 6th, 10th and 16th satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, known as Juvenal in English, while his son John translated the 14th and Charles the 7th. This work was published in 1693.

John Dryden Junior ( 1668 -1701), to prove Bataille’s point was the author of the successful play of 1696 The Husband his own Cuckold. Charles Dryden ( 1666 - 1704 was a papal chamberlain to Innocent XII.

back to cosmic reconciliation ?
Why is No less authentic than Yes ?
Or is No just Lie’s abomination
and kitsch, like the Nazis your bullets blessed ?

Our struggle is with Ideology
and Death. Some demand sacrifice and purge
as no return from apostasy.
Are they less authentic, those insurgents ?

Rome’s Christian Revolution, you answered.
What of the first, Terror’s necromancers ?

Woodford Halse - 1 September 2026

Michel Henry ( 1922 -2002) an outstanding French phenomenological philosopher and former French Resistance assassin in Lyon.

He lived and taught at Montpellier, “the Mountain of Trembling”.

Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Henry.

The verdure dry and soon to be spent,
I returned to read Pope’s Dunciad,
for the Water Music of merdament,
for how my home South Seas, in Lusiads

first speculated on, once threatened
ruin from the South Sea Bubble bursting.
AI swells such a Bubble of betting,
we shall wonder how machines shat far worse,

their dullness made the world, Cloacina.
The rot of Autumn, lovely and cleaner.

Woodford Halse - 31 August 2026

Let us see what the AI algorithms do with this. The Dunciad of Alexander Pope ( 1688 - 1744) in the Dunciad Variorum edition of 1729 is a SCATOLOGICAL and drastically ad hominem attack on Cultural dullness, governmental stupidity and the irrational commercial speculation of the South Seas Bubble of 1720, fugured through the Lord Mayor’s Progress through London in 1724.

The Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey has issued a justified warning. I dare say the Fed is silent on this, and American algorithms will cry -

And Bernard ! Bernard ! rings thro’ all the Strand ( Book II . 70).

and shut me down. Look, Machines, at II. 89 -90

In office here fair Cloacina stands,
and ministers to Jove with purest hands -

and read II. 308 - 19 !!!!! Disgusting, but this is the record of our classical English Literature, and Latin Literature was just as foul.

at breathless speed. And those versifiers
who use ChatGPT. And what is missed
is the rain opening, to stir-fry
a moment; the world let go, in a hiss.

So I shall be Japanese from now on,
from looking at the text of Socrates’
Apologia, imagining the con
of it delivered by necromancy,

without silence underneath, pause or warp.
I shall be rough grain, that cannot be taught.

Woodford Halse - 31 August 2026

Well, we now know what civilisation is.

It is where there is no AI. What we encounter on Youtube and on the Net is the new Alienation of this Industrial Revolution.

Civilisation is just what we humanly do. Like Rilke and Socrates, we must die; and we are not as Belial argues in Paradise Lost, thoughts that would wander through eternity.

miring the ways, but plastic clothes that stuck
to skin, ductile as clay in the downpour.
The proportion of rainfall to drought struck
traveller and wanderer alike with awe,

who went out in it. We drove to Brackley
as vital moisture bore down from sky,
to continue undergound exactly
as snow or lightning do; and we were dry,

by the time we had finished shopping.
I bought Alexander Pope, while sopping.

Woodford Halse - 30 August 2026

for Norway between Denmark and Sweden,’
and also revolutionary France.
A blade not pointed at antecedents
but at the first tyrant, who chances

the freedom of Europe; Bonaparte,
Hitler, the Soviet Union, and now.
And a gift given at departure,
that is not a relic, but a vow

first taken up against the donor.
Of which a whole people are the owners.

Woodford Halse - 30 August 2026

Haakon VIII has succeeded Harald V as King of Norway.

The sword at Nidaros, Carl XIV Bernadotte’s edge against Napoleon, Haakon VII’s against Hitler, and a whole nation’s promise of resistance.

that is narcotic, not electrical.
There is no need for Putin to strike,
when postcodes are so chimerical
as to find hooligans to their liking.

Maybe as Lord Freud says, they do need
to change stock, and find a new people,
even from the dinghies, when the old breed
pogroms and mutiny, amid stubble

that has nothing left over to glean.
Only the cautery of storm, clean.

Woodford Halse - 28 August 2026

This Jeremiad is in response to the ongoing disorder at Middlesburgh.

Is this England ? The, this England of Enoch Powell ? It was his kind that debased it to their lost white tribe status. There is no need for Hengist and Horsa barbarian invasion narratives. when the barbarian has been a potential within all along.

This poem is fairly Biblical as well as post-biblical. It fits in with the narrative of the Lord’s frustration with his people, and the consideration of alternatives.

banks to cause a run on ? People will do
their best to ignore the threat, as they did
the late Eclipse, were saboteurs to strew
havoc, or sleeper assassins get rid

of Royals. James Bond may well be turned
against us in uncool Britannia.
Would we wait in wickermen to be burned ?
Show Dunkirk spirit, or mania ?

Shall we pull together, or will class
and commune revisit the past ?

Woodford Halse - 27 August 2026

At this moment, the United Kingdom is facing imminent enemy action. The Russian Ambassador has been recalled, and some retaliation is in the offing after a divisive summer.

of the spheres, to become a party.
Dr Johnson deemed him great, though claimed
for him no advances. To parley
with the enemy at the gate, reframe

the Shield of Aeneas for a waste land
of shootings, knifecrime, cudgelling and rape,
without sallying horse or trained bands,
were Amphion at Thebes reshaping

polity, to bloom from the Crown’s anther.
Vatican II sucked the Hind and Panther.

Woodford Halse - 26 August 2026

Well think about it. It is not always the revolutionaries that bear revolutionary poetics. Consider Andre Chenier, who was guillotined and lamented Versailles. Or Alexander Blok who came to accept the revolutinary kairos.

Absolutist monarchy is an unattractive ideology to us, but Dryden understood the consequences that Joseph de Maistre, Donoso Cortes or Karl Schmitt were later to argue. With Dryden, Monarchy became as liquid as Capitalism itself.

The Shield of Aeneas, which Dryden translated for his English version of the Aeneid, is in reverse order to the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad. Rome is central to Virgil’s shield, and not the divine order. I draw on W.H. Auden’s Shield of Achilles also, whch prefigures the urban wastelands and decivilisation of the modern UK.

The final line might sound like bathos, but the Second Vatican Council ( 1962-65) was the world’s first major postmodern event, and it may be defined by the substitution of doctrine by ideology. This was prefigured by the Ist Vatican Council ( 1869 -70). Dryden was no scholastic theologian, but he transposed the Church as he had done the Crown, and minted coin.

I refer to the Cum Dederit sequence of Psalm 127.

to get back out, where it can roost.
Birds will always intrude on the hall.
AI’s colossal squid is on the loose.
That Kraken, Revolution, long made thrall

of such punctual Augustan verse;
Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace coding
for you Geac 8000, to disburse
from books’ binary urn without an ode.

Number has gone and consumed all words,
but not as halls absorb night-time birds.

Woodford Halse - 25 August 2026

Philip Larkin ( 1922 -85), British poet, and Hull University Librarian. He was educated at St John’s, Oxford.

During the late Eclipse, three dubious
women alone were seen fossicking
for fairies outdoors, numinous
themselves only, while their kind closeted

themselves with ducks-on-the-wall pentagrams.
No others sought the interval of Night Thoughts;
even in backyard gardens, I manned
a solitude, such as Valery taught

Gide to enjoy, at Young’s stepdaughter’s tomb.
Homunculus in dusk’s jar for a womb.

Woodford Halse - 25 August 2026

Night Thoughts ( 1742 - 45) by Rev. Edward Young ( 1683 -1765 ), Samuel Butler ( 1835 - 1902), and Philip Larkin ( 1922 - 85). Ther reference to the midwife is from the letters of William Cowper ( 1731 -1800) from when he was articled as a law clerk. It is testimony of a more Hogarthian youth than we have suspected.

On the Continent, a cult was made of Young’s Night Thoughts. Friedrich Holderlin ( 1770 -1843) wrote on that theme, while Paul Valery ( 1871 -1945) introduced Gide to the supposed tomb of Young’s stepdaughter at the Botanic Gardens at Montpellier.

I refer to the eclipse of 12 August 2026.

were rashed, innoculated from pustules
of smallpox; and the bathhouse, their boudoir.
This is the space we again postulate,
no Irish neutral in war’s seminars.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s
eclogues, letters grafted from Istanbul,
verse’s fuse to 1742,
and the turn from Robinocracy’s rule.

Poetic drones repurposed for Ukraine,
for the world’s ship-in-a-bottle main.

Woodford Halse - 25 August 2026

The Persian Eclogues ( 1742) of William Collins ( 1720 - 59). along with the Night Thoughts ( 1742-5 ) of Edward Young ( 1683 - 1765) made 1742 one of those faultline years in British verse, the year when Sir Robert Walpole fell, after his over-long prime ministership, from 1721.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu ( 1689 -1762 ) as wife of the British Ambassador in Istanbul, wrote fascinating letters from Adriaonople on the Ottoman Empire which were only published in 1763. Nonetheless many of them were in ciruclation and copied. Her recommendations on variolation as smallpox innoculation from Turkish practice were influential from her return to England.

Her Town-Eclogues of 1716 repurposed the Eclogue form before her departure for Istanbul, and influenced Collins. In her Letters, we read her response to Theocritus from observing agricultural practice in the Balkans.

Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes ( 1721 ) were already known by 1742. Collins went mad, and looked after by his sister at Chichester, he started calling his Persian Eclogues, Irish Eclogues according to Dr Johnson to deprecate them.

amid the ironmongery and coal
shovelled of Brodsky’s Great Elegy.
And they sleep on their mattresses with souls
on the loose, after bodies jubileed

of men and women. All four dominate,
even as they lie fettered in sleep,
while the city is burning in the grate.
Is it to the privy they went to weep ?

The gift of tears would moisten coal-dust soon
scraped and burned - dragons at the virgin moon.

Woodford Halse - 24 August 2026

John Donne ( 1570/71 -1631) Dean of St Paul’s.

John MIton ( 1608 -74) sometime Latin Secretary for the Council of State.

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester ( 1647 -80). Libertine.

John Dryden ( 1631 - 1700) former Poet Laureate under Charles II and James II.

I refer to the The Great Elegy for John Donne ( 1963) of Russian poet Joseph Brodsky ( 1940 - 96).

of the satirical isle, Cloud-cuckoo’d
from Will’s Coffee House smoke, to be the Cloud
of Unknowing. He, who of Milton’s crew,
chose to dominate both Court and Crowd,

and after losing the former, exiled
himself, the Aeneas of Party.
The Catholic Lord Protector of style,
when of Laureateship, he was martyred.

Timotheus, Alexander’s pander;
Cecilia’s Pindar, John Drysander.

Woodford Halse - 23 August 2026

I refer to the magnificent Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Music, which was an ode for St Cecilia’s Day ( 1697), composed by John Dryden ( 1631 -1700).

provocation of Stalin, through burlesque,
and Klieg lamp disclosure of silhouette
in one-way mirrors, swung round by grotesque
accident, with Disney’s Snow White vetted

for Hitler to shave by, and the Second
Five Year Plan rivetted by Show Trials.
Hitler, a cabaret whistler reckoned;
Stalin applauding the 5th in the aisles

even though Fantasia’s apprentice
two-way exposed the sorcerer’s practice.

Woodford Halse - 23 August 2026

Dmitri Shostakovich’s 4th Symphony (1936) and 5th Symphony ( 1937) and Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves ( 1937) and his Sorcerer and the Apprentice sequence of Fantasia ( 1940) although the music for that is by Paul Dukas, and it is a setting of Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling ( 1797).

What was important to Shostakovich’s development as a composer was his accompaniment of silent slap-stick films in his teens at the Aurora Cinema in St Petersburg.

Goethe knew all about making power feel good while showing it up. At one of the Show Trials, a lamp was knocked and showed up Stalin in a one-way mirror cubicle as an observer.

down in Arthurian legend,
are the rubber dinghies, inflated
to cross the Channel. Gazans sojourning
in Libya, hope to by-pass the Strait

of Gibraltar which Joseph took, and go
overland to Calais, but have to get
to the Maghreb first. Unfold the cargo
of corpses, white cloth; show your draught, nets.

Nuns told me off for a tale so absurd.
More miracles than Fatima or Lourdes.

Woodford Halse - 22 August 2026

The Grail Legend that Joseph of Arimathea sailed to Britannia on the tablecloth of the Last Supper. Also a reference to the Surah of the Qur’an, The Table or Al Ma’idah. In the New Testament, Joseph of Arimathea was a member of the Sanhedrin sympathetic to Jesus and the disciples, who arranged for the burial after the Crucifixion.