Phantom Listeners

"I liked war poetry best, the more savage the better, and knew by heart most of Siegfried Sassoon's and many of Wilfred Owen's and Robert Nichols';  and the gentle magic of Walter de la Mare worked as powerfully in the glare of the African bush as among the haunted shadows, moonlit orchards and crepuscular churchyards that inspired his muse.  Riding M'zee through the coffee plantation my sun-warmed spine would chill to a vision of a host of phantom listeners thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair; I would see, among spiky, yellow sodom-apples beside a winding path through the reserve, a bank of ancient briars so old that no man knows through what wild century roves back the rose; and the two worlds joined when a red-eyed dove puffing its iridescent breast in song would recall the smooth-plumed bird in the emerald shade, the seed of grass, the speck of stone that the wayfaring ant stirs, and hastes on.   And although the poet's twilit northern land of yew-trees and goblins, and our scorched and dappled plains and heat-stunned ridges, were as far apart in character as in distance, there lay between them a bond of magic, of the feel of things just out of sight, of the blundering owl, the four-clawed mole and the hooded bat, and their enigmatic reminder that blind as these three to me, so blind to someone I must be.

A parcel from the Poetry Bookshop was therefore the most exciting argosy to be looked for from an English mail."

The Mottled Lizard  Elspeth Huxley

O Nightingale my heart

"O Nightingale my heart
How sad thou art!
How heavy is thy wing,
Desperately whirred that thy throat may fling
Song to the tingling silences remote!
Thine eye whose ruddy spark
Burned fiery of late,
How dead and dark!
Why so soon didst thou sing,
And with such turbulence of love and hate?

Lear that there is no singing yet can bring
The expected dawn more near;
And thou art spent already, though the night
Scarce has begun;
What voice, what eyes wilt thou have for the light
When the light shall appear,
And O what wings to bear thee t'ward the Sun?"

O Nightingale my heart   Robert Nichols
(courtesy of poemhunter.com)

The quest for the Great Happiness

"Later in 1944 Cecil and Elisabeth began the first of their sojourns in Cambridge.  It was typical of wartime conditions that they found themselves in circumstances so cramped that they had to make up their bed every night under a grand piano.  They were saved from this by a new friend, the poet Robert Nichols who suggested they should take a room in the lodgings at 12 Newnham Terrace, where he lived.

Collins turned again to print-making, but without the support he had had in the Dartington studios.  He worked in an unheated attic of the house in Newnham Terrace in the winter of 1944-5:  the facilities available to him were so meagre that he was forced to employ the wax stencils used in Roneo machines to make his masters, with a penknife, sandpaper and needles for his tools.  This new medium enabled him to undertake further explorations of the theme of the Fool in prints such as The Joy of the Fool,  as well as the enchanting work The Artist's Wife Seated in a Tree*...."  

Cecil Collins  The quest for the Great Happiness   William Anderson
[*both these prints are in the Tate Gallery]