I’ve been very tied up with Kathleen Raine (1908-2003), whose life was coterminous with that of my grandmother, who was also called Kathleen. For almost a year I’ve been reading through her collected poems, and I’ve just finished “Remember the Rowan,” a novel about by Kirsten MacQuarrie about Raine’s intense but ultimately destructive love for Gavin Maxwell; and I spent much of yesterday writing a screenplay based on the novel.

This is a simple poem, and Raine tells us in the first line that she meant to write a different poem, probably a much grander one. But she walked out into her small London garden, which I imagine to be just like our London garden, and noticed “paradise descending.” That’s very like William Blake, a hero of Raine’s, who saw angels filling a tree on Peckham Rye. Raine lingers in the garden before having to return to “the day’s occupation” but noticing that “The birds do not hurry away, their day/Neither begins nor ends.” In the summer I walk out into our garden at about six in the morning and watch the bees gathering pollen from the poppies and listen to their buzzing. It’s a good start to the day, and I like how Raine’s poem captures the magic that can be found in a small London garden.

I Had Meant to Write a Different Poem

I had meant to write a different poem,
But, pausing for a moment in my unweeded garden,
Noticed, all at once, paradise descending in the morning sun
Filtered through leaves,
Enlightening the meagre London ground, touching with green
Transparency the cells of life.
The blackbird hopped down, robin and sparrow came,
And the thrush, whose nest is hidden
Somewhere, it must be, among invading buildings
Whose walls close in,
But for the garden birds inexhaustible living waters
Fill a stone basin from a garden hose.

I think, it will soon be time
To return to the house, to the day’s occupation,
But there, time neither comes nor goes.
The birds do not hurry away, their day
Neither begins nor ends.
Why can I not stay? Why leave
Here, where it is always,
And time leads only away
From this hidden ever-present simple place.