“‘The old life done.’”

A brief note to our readers.

Joan Miró. Composition. 1927. (Wikimedia Commons.)

2 August—We try hard at The Floutist to stay current, to publish often, and offer our readers insights and perspectives not found elsewhere. These past days it has been hard to keep up with our own expectations, to say nothing of our readers’.

To explain briefly, we are now completing a house move, always arduous, usually an agony. This one has been both, as our kindly landlady forced us out of our house under a wholly uncalled-for threat of eviction simply because we insisted on our legal rights as tenants—a nasty business. It is done, we have a lot of settling in and sorting to do yet, but we are eager to rejoin our readers.

This we shall do shortly. The thing about a hiatus of the kind we ask our readers to understand is that the notebooks tend to fill like springs with ideas for future work. So it is with ours. Please stand by.

In the mean, I’ll share a poem I’ve long loved, as these past days have brought it to mind. It is called The Journey. I tend to like the early work of the poets I read: I often find a freshness in it—the freshness of youth, maybe. W.H. Auden wrote The Journey in 1928, very early in his career. He had just turned 21.

“But with prolonged drowning shall develop gills”—an unforgettable line.

—P.L.

The Journey

To throw away the key and walk away,
Not abrupt exile, the neighbours asking why,
But following a line with left and right,
An altered gradient at another rate,
Learns more than maps upon the whitewashed wall,
The hand put up to ask; and makes us well
Without confession of the ill. All pasts
Are single old past now, although some posts
Are forwarded, head looking on a new view
The future shall fulfil a surer vow.
Not smiling at queen over the glass rim
Nor making gunpowder in the top room,
Not swooping at the surface still like gulls
But with prolonged drowning shall develop gills.
But there are still to tempt; areas not seen
Because of blizzards or an erring sign
Whose guessed at wonders would be worth alleging,
And lies about the cost of a night’s lodging;
Travellers may sleep at inns but not attach;
They sleep one night together, not asked to touch;
Receive no normal welcome, not the pressed lip.
Children to lift, not the assuaging lap.
Crossing the pass descend the growing stream
Too tired to hear except the pulses’ strum,
Reach villages to ask for a bed in
Rock shutting out the sky, the old life done.

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