Read the book: «The Uncertain Land and Other Poems»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword by Nikolai Tolstoy

Part I: Poems

Blitz poetry

‘The sea and the sky are silent’

Mrs Koren

‘The harsh dry polished rattle’

‘You will come to it’

The Olive Harvest

The Inine

tibi donum offero

A present

French verses

Mal du pays

Le bois des oiseaux

Espagnols exilés

‘A dog bit his master’

Goat

Looking towards the south

Foxes surprised

Epitaph

February

The Deep Gold of a Pomegranate-Tree

The Cypress Tree

Meads no more

The Lagoon

A Lycéen

In Upper Leeson Street

How to lay a mine

The far side of the pass

August, Sun-impaled

Words from the bottom of a river

Croagh Patrick

A T’ang Landscape Remembered

Song

Farewell, my sin I have enjoyed you

A man under his impulsion

David danced before the ark

The falling of the leaves

Dear Mona Fitzpatrick ’32 (or ’3)

The theft

The electric light failing

Youth gone

Giving up smoking

Diego

Spaniards Exiled

The Captain and the Stock

To the hermitage and down, refreshed

Waiting for money in a far country

In Madame Ponsalié’s garden

Walk by the sea to see wonders

The raven

The young listless man

From the Welsh

Snowdon for the sunrise

The wine-dark sea

The bad day

Sterne

The Pleiades on Christmas Eve

The apology

Dead hours of louring justification, a desert of time

Myself a young man read a poem

The uncertain land

Silver-haired charm and urbanity

Winter in Foreign Parts

Obsèques

The dark figures

‘Is true the rat’

The duty of pleasure

Poulp: or, the Medusa a Toy

Grey and white

No smoking: the second day

Pray, Luv, forgive me my sourness

The Mandrake

For Louise’s visitors’ book

‘Clouds over clouds’

‘Walking on the high mountain’

‘Help my understanding, Lady’

‘Down through the vines’

Collioure

‘Long, straight, the steel lines’

‘If I could go back into my dream’

‘Loose-bellied, grey’

Old Men

‘When your lance fails’

Part II: Drafts

The Sardana for the First Time

‘Yesterday an old husband’

‘Whereas in Jewry came a star’

‘Not that a hard-roed herring should presume’

‘The pattering of rain’

‘The cry of buzzards in the sky’

‘Vicious intromission’

Forbear O Venus pray forbear

A halt on the Trans-Siberian

‘When my Muse and Chian Veins vie’

The sorrow & woe

Boars

Night walking

‘On the mountain I have quite a good sense of direction’

The True-born Englishman

‘Sun sloping through the cypresses’

Labuntur anni (The advancing years)

‘Peace; a great lawn that small, fat feet’

The hard winter

‘An old thin tall man’

What the hell do you know about poverty?

‘The north wind low over the house’

‘High on the cold mountain road’

‘I went out in a night of tearing wind’

‘A wheeling buzzard lifting to the sun’

‘Thoughts that range from anger and revenge’

‘Of France and of the knowledge of that land’

Captivity

‘When a dry heart sets a bleeding’

Loud-mouthed neighbours through the floor

‘For Jojo’s livre d’or 85’

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Index of first lines

The Works of Patrick O’Brian

About the Publisher

Foreword

I do not know when Patrick first began composing poetry. However, I strongly suspect that it was during his frequently lonely adolescence, when he was cooped up largely alone in his father’s successive homes. He was from an early age a voracious reader. He was also a passionate devotee of the natural world, and during the three years he lived as an adolescent boy at Lewes in Sussex he spent long happy hours wandering along the banks of the nearby river Ouse, and along the sands of the beach below the towering white cliffs at Seaford. Much of his poetry is concerned with limpid depictions of animals, especially birds, and delicate descriptions of the landscape with which he was familiar.

The earliest specimens of his poetry to have survived are, in contrast, robustly humorous (even mildly erotic) – which will come as no surprise to readers of the Aubrey-Maturin epic. During the Blitz in 1940–41 he and my mother drove ambulances in Chelsea, which was heavily bombed by Luftwaffe aeroplanes offloading their remaining bombs before returning homeward above the moonlit Thames. Patrick entertained his fellow workers in the ambulance station at 18 Danvers Street by acting as unofficial bard of the unit. There he composed a lively anthem for the denizens of number 22 Station of the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service. He also concocted a poetic narrative recounting the nocturnal adventures of my mother’s faithful dachshund, Miss Patz, who sneaks out of her lodgings to join the regulars at the Black Lion pub around the corner from the ambulance station, and moves on to one of the many shady little drinking clubs which characterised the perilous Chelsea of those days. I suspect that Miss Patz’s exploits reflected in some degree those of her adventurous owner. My mother, in addition, assisted with the fluent German and French sections of the poem, being fluent in both languages.

For four years after the War my parents lived in a tiny cottage in the mountains of Snowdonia, where their fare depended in large part on Patrick’s skill with rod and gun. They were also avid followers of the local foxhounds, a hunt conducted on foot amid wildly dramatic mountain scenery. There, as Patrick’s novel Three Bear Witness^fn1 attests, he paid minute attention to landscape and wildlife. I find it hard to believe that he did not also commemorate them in poetry at the same time, although all of his muse that survives is his cheerful ode to a generous American lady who sent them tins of marmalade in 1946.

In 1949 he and my mother migrated to Collioure in the south of France. During the more rewarding decades which ensued, Patrick regularly jotted down poems in little notebooks and on odd sheets of paper. Among the earliest verse surviving from that period are allusions to the wild and rugged landscape they had left behind them, which was not dissimilar to that of the Pyrenees towering above the little town.

Many of Patrick’s salient characteristics are revealed in this collection: his recurring fear of death, love of local scenery, and careful perception of the patient labours of the local inhabitants. Although he was broadly apolitical, in his poem Espagnols exilés he manifests poignant sympathy for Spanish Republicans who had fled across the frontier in 1939, a residue of whom lingered on in Collioure after my parents’ arrival.

However, it should not be thought that his themes are all melancholy. He cherished a copy of Edward Lear’s poems, given to me by a fond great-aunt for my fourth birthday, which my mother abstracted shortly afterwards when she departed our family home to live with Patrick. ‘A dog bit his master’, composed not long after their arrival at Collioure, provides a fine specimen of Patrick’s love of the absurd.

In the following year he composed his poem ‘In Upper Leeson Street’, which nostalgically evokes his memorable stay in Dublin in 1937, where he completed his precocious novel Hussein. Although even in private he talked little about his former life (save, I assume, to my mother), it is clear that in his mind he dwelt much on their early days of adventurous privation, as well as images of people and places lovingly stored in his memory. The earliest allusions are to be found in the reverie ‘If I could go back into my dream’, which if I am not mistaken draws upon childish fancies of wild beasts frequenting the streets, areas, and corners of the London with which he was familiar when living there as a small boy of five.

Although Patrick devoted much care to poetic composition, much of it does not appear even to have been submitted for publication. Unlike his prose, which he generally looked upon with justified approval, he quite frequently expressed hesitant reservations about the value of his poetry. As he noted in his diary in October 1978, ‘More work on poems, but doubt keeps creeping in & as I wrote on one of them, simplicity can come v close to silliness’. But he was rigorously self-critical, and I for one find his poetry delightful.

He was strongly drawn to the genre, and possessed a particular penchant for the writings of Chaucer, which he possessed in Tyrwhitt’s handsome two-volume edition (1798). Time and again, when relaxing with a drink after the day’s labours were done, he would return to the ebullient Father of English Poetry with zestful pleasure. When I stayed with my parents in the days of my youth, we would follow supper by taking it in turns to read aloud our favourite poems accompanied by the shrilling of cicadas in the darkened vineyard. For some reason, this congenial practice was later abandoned, but it was doubtless continued when Patrick was alone with my mother.^fn2

In September 1978 Patrick noted in his diary:

My poems discourage me: too personal, often too trifling. There are some I like that would do for general consumption but probably not enough to make a book.

However, he had earlier noted:

These last 2 days I’ve been looking through my poems, with the idea of picking out enough of those that do not make me blush for a volume: many I had quite forgotten & some surprised me agreeably.

Although he sent a batch shortly afterwards to his sympathetic literary agent Richard Scott Simon, only a handful saw the light of publication during Patrick’s lifetime. Now, however, this handsome collection has been brought together, containing both polished versions and drafts that for one reason or another were left in an unfinished state, which I do not doubt will give Patrick’s legion of admirers around the world the pleasure they afford me.

NIKOLAI TOLSTOY, 2018